


Untitled Fantasy

by KonaRaque



Category: Original Work
Genre: Cussing, Magic, Mythical Beings & Creatures
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 08:03:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 43,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13244001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KonaRaque/pseuds/KonaRaque
Summary: This is a high fantasy work I am working on for my husband and some friends of mine. Part 1 (Chapters 1 - 13) was a holiday gift to them.Feedback is good. I want feedback.The characters' names were chosen by the people they're based on, so any feedback on those will be used to mock those people.





	1. Fulgrim

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AGlassRoseNeverFades](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AGlassRoseNeverFades/gifts).



**Fulgrim**

“Not my anvil, you don’t!” Fulgrim shouted furiously. The Crafting Guild had been threatening to start repossessions on his smithy for a few weeks now, but Fulgrim had never received the notices. “You can’t just take a man’s livelihood, you fuckberry cunt bubbles!”

He realized the mistake as soon as he made it. With his latest jibe, the dwarves hauling his things out turned to stare at him for a second before raising the anvil above their heads and smashing it to bits on the adamantine flooring of his high-end smithy. Correction, their high-end smithy.

Fulgrim fell to his knees and stared at the pile of metal on the floor, his mouth agape at the loss of several platinum coins worth of equipment lying in shards and the thousands of gold walking out the front door. He had never missed a payment in his life. He had up-to-date books in the back room that could have proven his innocence. That is to say that they would have helped. The first things the Crafting Guild always took from delinquents were their books. It was just good business to make sure that no one could prove they were wrong.

“What am I supposed to do with my life now?” Fulgrim Doomhammer’s whole life had been about crafting. He studied gadgeteering under the best gnomes in Stony Top. His journeyman years were spent under the eyes of the greatest living crafters in Cone Cove. His world had just collapsed because someone had made an accounting error.

Luckily for him, he was forever an optimist. He dusted off his pants, donned his apron, and strode out the door to start his life over from scratch. This would have been a much more powerful gesture if the repo-men hadn’t stopped him at the door and took his incredibly nice apron.

Fulgrim decided to see his brother. If they had taken everything from his shop, it made sense that his home had been ransacked and foreclosed on. He would go check later, but it was more important to go see that his brother was safe and sound.

Falagan Doomhammer was the furthest thing from his brother a dwarf could be in stature and physique. They grew up together in Shoal Side. The seaside village was an oddity for dwarves. Dwarves, you may think, are molded from rocks under the mountains of the world and fear the sky when stepping into the light of day. Well you, my friend, are a racist. Dwarves live in many places and have varied skills and trades.

Falagan just happened to be more afraid of light than most. That wasn’t from fear of falling into the sky, racist. It’s because he lived in the shadows. The roguish dwarf made his riches young and lived comfortably around the block from Fulgrim’s shop in their hometown of Shoal Side. His talents were legendary amongst the other rogues in the country.

His feats had included breaking into a madman’s castle and stealing the famed Eye of Bananas. It got the name from its color. They might have named it something else if anyone had bothered to think that a stone that slowly drives you mad shouldn’t just be called Banana because it’s yellow.

Falagan did have one major flaw though. He never could turn down a bet. He sold the stone for a pretty 5 platinum coins. He turned around and lost it the same day when a dwarf child said he bet a copper coin that he could beat Falagan in a hopscotch race. The legendary master of balance and poise tripped on a vine and lost the bet.

The story should have stopped there, and it would have with any sane person. Falagan was not sane when it came to money, though. He bet double or nothing and tripped on the same vine again. His pride was too damaged to let that slide, so he went balls deep and bet the poverty stricken child a platinum coin that he could do it faster. Before the kid could say, “But sir, I have no money and can’t afford to pay you if you win. You would bankrupt my family for decades if I took that bet,” Falagan had started jumping and tripped on the same vine.

The child should have been happy. He had just won his family enough money to live and eat for years to come. His face, however, was more one of fear than joy. The crazy man jumped up and screamed, “Five Platinum!” When he, unsurprisingly, tripped on the same vine, the child sat down in exhaustion.

Falagan never would have lived that one down if the child had told anyone. He handed the kid all of his money with the saddest look an adult could have and said in a quiet and threatening voice, “A bet’s a bet. You tell people I gave you the money ‘cause you needed it. If I ever hear someone talking about this little scenario, even if I am a million kingdoms away, I will kill your puppy. I will shit on the grave and laugh as you watch me do it. Do you understand what I just said?” The little boy nodded his head in terror and closed his eyes as Falagan stalked off in frustration. That kid’s family runs a bakery a few counties away now. He insisted on it. He is also quite protective of his new golden haired puppy.

Falagan was a legend for his skill, but his lack thereof when it came to gambling was a well-guarded secret. Only his brother knew about his shame. Fulgrim loved his brother and encouraged him in all of his endeavors. Falagan returned the favor by leaving his brother alone for the most part, which Fulgrim appreciated. Today was the first day in months that they would see each other.

As Fulgrim reached Falagan’s house, he noticed a writ nailed to the door next to a bunch of nails that had obviously been for further writs. Presumably, Falagan had torn each down and hadn’t bothered to remove the nails. He sighed and tore the new one down with the intention of retrieving a claw from inside to remove the nails. But he stopped short of walking inside when he saw the name “Fulgrim Doomhammer” on the notice. It read as follows.

_Dear Fulgrim Doomhammer,_

_We regret to inform you that this will be the final notice regarding your four hundred platinum coin debt with the crafting guild. Our repeated attempts to reach an agreement with you regarding your debt must end after our thirtieth notice. You have been receiving our notes as we have had someone watch as you repeatedly tear each down without so much as a cursory glance. Your debt must be paid by next week or we shall be repossessing your shop inventory and established brick-and-mortar location. You have had ample time to repay your debt and collection must come due._

_With Regards,_

_Guild Master of Coin_

_Tingledown Festudy_

Fulgrim couldn’t believe it. Falagan had gotten repeated warnings of his impending shop failure and never even read the notices. His life had gone down the drain because someone sent the letters to the wrong Doomhammer. Or more likely, they sent them to the correct place and person with the wrong name, as Fulgrim was certain he would remember had he incurred such a massive debt. Either way, Fulgrim had lost his entire livelihood because his inconsiderate brother couldn’t be arsed.

Fulgrim wasn’t a born pacifist or anything, but he was somewhat against violence. His anger had gotten the better of him in his younger days and he learned not to blow his lid when things got bad. His rage could be dangerous considering he was a three foot wide dwarf who worked a forge every single day for more than sixty years.

He had done so well for so many decades. This was the first time he let it get the better of him. He grabbed Falagan’s door at the frame and ripped it straight off the hinges. He walked into his brother’s living room and slammed the door onto the floor at Falagan’s feet.

Falagan hadn’t seen Fulgrim like this in a long time. He pulled his feet onto the couch and put on a smile only a baby would think was real. “Hey, little brother. What brings my door to me? I mean… What brings you to my door?”

Fulgrim breathed deeply and allowed himself to calm down. It wasn’t his brother’s malice that caused this. Fulgrim trampled across the door and into his brother’s kitchen. He pulled a mug from the cabinet and poured himself a full mug of ale from the tap. Falagan may have lost money easily and on a common basis, but the money that made it home with him was well spent on luxuries.

Fulgrim slumped back into the living room and flopped down in the chair opposite from the front door…er, hole in the wall. “They took my shop today.” He let that sink in for Falagan. “They also went to my house and took everything, I presume. I haven’t been by there, but the notice said they would be stopping by.”

“Shit. You should be a little more careful with your money.”

Fulgrim, really not wanting to commit fratricide, took a long deep breath and chugged the ale. “Never mind that. I don’t feel like talking about it. I need a place to stay for the night. Mind if I sleep here tonight?”

“Whatever you need, Grim. Is there anything I can get you?”

“Actually, yes. Would you mind going by my place and getting my number one axe? I hid it under a floorboard in the back washroom. They shouldn’t have found it. I would greatly appreciate it.”

“No problem. I’ll be back in a bit. You look beat. Get some rest and we’ll go get something to eat tonight.” Falagan leapt out of his seat and sauntered out the front hole in the wall. Fulgrim felt tired and decided taking a nap wouldn’t be such a bad idea. He finished off his ale and set the mug on the floor next to the big couch. He lay down there and fell quickly to sleep.

*****

His dreams were restless. He saw his brother stealing money from his store while he slowly went bankrupt from it. He saw a few groups of elves travelling from distant lands to meet him and his brother in a large temple. He saw many strange things that he couldn’t understand.

He awoke with a start. A dagger was flying right at his face. He reached up and blocked the hand swinging it. A large figure in a dark hood was pushing down with the dagger, but Fulgrim had little trouble holding the hand back. He tried jumping from the couch, but the figure put its other hand behind the dagger and pushed with all its weight. This made only a minor difference to Fulgrim. His smithy had made him strong enough to lift heavy boulders with ease and ripping a door from its hinges is no easy task for most. He placed his free hand on the figure’s chest and shoved so hard that its legs came out from under it.

“What do you want, creature?”

“Who are you calling creature, runt?” The voice had a deep rumble to it. The dwarf was caught off guard by the voice, just surprised enough to be tackled by the massive figure. Fulgrim had met many races across his travels before returning to Shoal Side. This being was at least six foot six slouched over in the dwarf sized house.

The surprise charge knocked Fulgrim back a few steps. He recovered and grabbed the thing by its back and slammed it into the ground with so much force that he left a crack.

The thing staggered, but stood back up. It wavered and its hood fell off the back of its head. It was a bronze scaled dragonborn. He stood to a mere six foot now. The slam must have hurt, but dragonborn were tough SOBs. The dragonborn stood back and smiled wide at Fulgrim. This was the kind of smug smile a guy throws at another guy when he has just stolen something precious from him and knows he got away with it. The guy smirked his awful smirk and threw the dagger right at Fulgrim’s face.

Dwarves are not known for their dexterity. They are known for strength, drinking, strong character, drinking heavily, mercantilism, and drinking competitions. Fulgrim had the hand-eye coordination of a lifelong smith, but it just wasn’t enough to dodge the dagger or do anything but think about how much the last twelve hours had been like life was just bending him over and fucking him right in the asshole.

As that last thought crossed his mind, the dagger disappeared from the space in front of him altogether. It had reappeared with a ‘thunk’ on the wall adjacent to his left shoulder. A second dagger had flown through the air, stabbed the other dagger hard enough to impale it, and used its remaining force to jam it into a stone wall.

“Mind if I **cut** in?” Falagan dove into the room and retrieved both daggers from the wall opposite the front hole in the wall. Fulgrim thought about how odd it was that he had been able to sleep with such a massive hole in the wall, then shrugged it off in favor of rooting his brother on. The dragonborn held up his hands and said, “Whoa! Hold on a damn minute!” He looked from one brother to the other. “Who are you and who is he? I think I may be in the wrong house.”

*****

After a few mugs of ale in Falagan’s living room, they found out that the dragonborn’s name was Eaes’sid and he was an assassin in the employ of a madman who’d recently lost possession of a valuable set of kitchen utensils.

“I was told to hunt down the dwarf named Falagan Doomhammer. I found this was your house. I saw a sleeping dwarf and assumed it was you. I stabbed without thinking. I thought you were supposed to be a small man, not a fucking tree trunk. You can see my confusion.”

“I see that, yes. Why did you say stop though?” Fulgrim didn’t know much about assassins, but he was pretty sure they didn’t say time-out when something unexpected happened.

“Obviously, I’m too awesome for him to handle and he had to surrender.” Falagan had a huge grin on his face that either suggested he was kidding or delusional. Fulgrim made a guess at the latter.

Eaes’sid laughed. A chuckle at first became a chortle that grew a bit too much for Falagan’s pride. With the deflation of his brother’s face, Fulgrim asked again. “Why would you stop then?”

“I was told that there would be one dwarf. I was told he was a bad guy. I was told that I would be a hero if I stopped him. I didn’t expect him to have family and be a nice guy with beer in his house. In short, I was told to kill a sad, evil, little dwarf. The way he threw that dagger meant he was probably from the guild. Finding out he’s a member of the Rogue Guild changes things.”

“Members of the guild can’t kill each other or harm family of other members. It’s punishable with eye for an eye. If he had killed you,” Falagan explained,” I would be granted the right to kill his…”

“… sister,” finished Eaes’sid. “She is just a hatchling. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if something happened to her.”

“Seems kinda gruesome,” said Fulgrim.

“It has to be,” said Falagan. “If it weren’t…”

“… nobody would care about breaking the rule,” finished Eaes’sid.

Fulgrim thought it was strange how they seemed to finish each other’s sentences. It creeped him out a little. “What now? You can’t kill him now. Do you just go back and tell this madman that the job can’t be done? Do you lie and say you did it?”

“I can’t lie. The guy put a spell on the place I have to meet him. No one can lie in that place except him. I also can’t just tell the guy that I’m not doing the job. He is way more powerful than I am. You try telling a guy with zombie minions that you won’t be doing his bidding because it’s immoral.”

Fulgrim guessed he saw his point. “What will you do then? For that matter, what will we do? Your house isn’t safe anymore, brother.”

“I thought about that,” said Falagan. “You need to leave Shore Side for a while. Maybe I can go kill this asshole with no dinner forks before he tries to kill you again.”

“I’m sure you are a capable warrior,” chimed in Eaes’sid. “This guy is at least a 30 though.”

This confused Fulgrim. “A what?”

“A 30,” repeated Falagan. “We assign number values to the level of danger a member would face if they wanted to steal from or kill a particular target. You for instance, little brother, would be a 1. You have no combat training and probably wouldn’t stand a chance against a kobold. I, on the other hand…” Falagan would have finished his sentence, if at that moment he hadn’t been hurled across the room into his back wall.

“Just because I make things for a living, doesn’t mean I am helpless.”

“Falagan Doomhammer was a 5 according to the madman. You catching him off guard means that you must be at least a 3.”

“No.” Falagan stood up slowly and brushed himself off. He adjusted his jaw and limped slowly back to where he had been. “I didn’t even see the fist come up. I must admit, brother, I had not considered you a fighter. Movements that quick put you at my level.”

“I’m not a fighter. I’m a defender. I just don’t like being insulted.”

“That’s settled then. We can both go kill this guy.”

“Did you even hear me say 30? He isn’t someone you casually screw around with. You would need at least…twelve people at that level to take down someone that powerful, and most of them would die.”

“I have nothing left to my name, save my axe. You did retrieve my axe, right?”

Falagan produced a five-foot long battle axe, its head glinting in the low light. The ornate designs normally carved into dwarven weapons were absent from this specimen. The head was about sixteen inches across and looked sharp enough to cleave slowly drifting hair in twain. As Fulgrim took his axe from Falagan, Eaes’sid let out a low hiss that Fulgrim took to be a dragonborn equivalent of a whistle. “That, my friend, is a sexy piece of metal. Where did you get something so deadly?”

“He made it.” Falagan looked at his brother with more pride than Fulgrim had ever witnessed him show. “He is the greatest smith in all of Shore Side and the surrounding counties.”

“I was,” pointed out Fulgrim. “As of today, I am no longer a smith. They took away my tools and my shop. I’m just a dwarf with an axe now.”

“And a punch that can send 250 pounds six feet. You sell yourself short.” Eaes’sid chuckled at his own pun. Dwarves don’t tend to like short jokes, but the speaker being dragonborn caught them off guard with this one and they both started chuckling a bit despite themselves. “You have the talent to craft and the ability to strike quickly and powerfully. Perhaps, if we train a bit, we can indeed destroy the mad mage.”

The brothers looked at each other and then back to their guest. “Together?”


	2. Rizra

**Rizra**

The job was going well. Rizra hadn’t had to break in. He hadn’t needed to kill anyone. And for the first job in a long while, he hadn’t needed to steal anything. When he first got the job from the guild, he thought it was going to be difficult. They told him to break into a building filled to the brim with magical traps and get to the center without being spotted or killed.

Most security jobs like this one were easy money. They just have you run through their security and set off the traps to see how a person could avoid them. This job in particular had been ridiculously easy though. All of the traps were massive elaborate puzzles, but each one could be bypassed quietly and easily without warning the guards and beasts as long as you had the basic knowledge to look around the room for the answer. None of the traps had even been guarded by any of the aforementioned guards or monsters. It was an embarrassment to the Dungeon Construction Guild. They must have complained non-stop while building this whole damn place.

Rizra would have had a tough time getting past all of the traps and beasts, if he had tried. He hadn’t needed to though. As soon as he saw the building entrance, he noticed what looked like steam coming from a vent on top. He climbed the tree next to the building and found that the steam was just warm air wafting up through the cold night air.

He had climbed into the vent and started crawling further into the building. He fully expected to encounter a fork in the vents, or traps in the vents, or some kind of magical rats up there. What he found though was that the vents were built into the ceiling and completely free of obstacles. He crawled through the entire complex looking down into room after room of easy traps and bored guards.

The monsters even seemed to have nothing to do. They were well fed, which was not the norm for magical dungeons. If you feed your beasts too well, they tend to think the intruders are just there to give them food. That can sometimes lead to adventurers taking the beasts away as pets. This is, in fact, how the nekojin Rizra had gained his first traveling companion.

Normally, rogues don’t travel with pets. Dogs can be loyal and fierce companions, but this usually means they get in the way of arrows and attack people well above their paygrade. They also don’t stealth well unless trained by the best, and that costs too much money. Nekojin don’t like having cats as pets because people tend to ask dumb questions about whether or not they’re related and tell dumb jokes about pets looking like their owners. Bears and other large mammals didn’t work well for how stealthy Rizra needed to be most of the time, though sometimes he wished he had a mammoth familiar so that he could just sit back and enjoy a day off while it trampled every enemy of his into the ground.

Rizra had found his pet in a dungeon, being so well fed that it hopped right over to him and begged for food. After the obligatory cooing over how cute the creature was, Rizra had indeed decided to feed the miniature owlbear and it hadn’t left his side ever since.

The word miniature here means to the extreme. Owlbears are normally as fierce as owls, but with the size and shape of bears. Rizra’s owlbear was the size of a kitten, though the shape of a bear with the face of an owl, and the potential strength of a fully grown grizzly. It had been a great boon to find such a creature, especially to a stealthy loner.

As he crawled through the vents, the scritching of a beak on his black tunic made him stop. He pulled a small pemmican pellet from a pouch hanging from his belt. He stuffed the pellet into his tunic and continued crawling.

He finally reached the end of the vent after crawling for about ten minutes. Whatever else he could say in his report about this place, the facility was damn huge. Ten minutes of crawling his speed would put the center of the facility at more than a thousand feet from the edge. The building had so many wasted traps and guards. Someone paid a pretty big penny for a pretty dumb facility.

The vent ended by twisting from the ceiling to the left wall of a hallway. The hallway ended at a circular hallway wrapping around the center room of the facility. There was a door to the center room facing the hallway. He pulled open the vent face plate and stuck his head through a little to look around. There wasn’t a single guard in the entire area. He listened and heard nothing. He took another pemmican pellet out and tossed it onto the opposite wall. It stuck and slowly slid down the wall. When it touched the floor, nothing happened. Rizra waited a few seconds to see if there was a time delayed trap. Nothing happened.

Nothing for a few more minutes either. Rizra decided to use his arcana goggles, just in case. Nothing showed up. He stared around, aghast at the emptiness of the halls. “Orcus, check the door.” The tiny owlbear climbed from his tunic and hopped to the ground. It walked over to the door and sniffed at the edges. After a moment, the tiny animal sat and waited without a sound.

“Nothing?” Rizra was confused. This job was a high paying one. He had expected it to be difficult at some point. The vent was just a boon that he had expected to end and drop him into some kind of fire pit or something. The center room, he thought, should be a trove of dangerous magic and crazy protections. Orcus could sense magic and traps though. If he wasn’t whining, then nothing dangerous lay on the other side of the door.

Rizra dropped out of the vent and landed without a sound. He walked to the door and checked the edges himself to confirm his pet’s notion. No traps or magic seemed to be around. The door wasn’t even locked. “Good job, buddy.” He took the pemmican pellet from the floor and tossed it into the salivating beak of the owlbear. Then he took his tiny friend and stuffed him back into his tunic.

After all the hype around this job, he thought it would take all night. It was starting to look like he could get done with it and have a bunch of time left before sunrise. He slowly opened the door, looking around as he did. There was nothing in the whole room, save a plinth in the center.

There was nothing on it. The job specified that to complete the contract, the person had to reach the center of the building and place a guild calling card on the pillar. He searched the room for a few seconds, taking in his surroundings. He then slowly crept toward the plinth, sweeping his gaze across the whole room every few steps. When he reached the pillar, he carefully set the card down. Fear of some kind of well-hidden trap kept him from confidently slamming it down and walking back out through the front door.

The card touched the pillar and nothing happened. Rizra looked around the entire room from floor to ceiling. He crept backwards, sweeping the room as he did on the way in. He walked back through the door, wiped the residue from the pemmican off the floor, and climbed back into the vent.

Over his many years of being a rogue, Rizra had gained a sense for feeling danger. It applied itself to situations that were life threatening in nature, but also applied to situations that endangered his coin purse. He couldn’t tell the difference between the two when it happened though.

He had a strong danger sense as he slowly crawled his way back out. It took him longer to get out than it did getting in because of his rogue caution.

As he approached the last few meters to freedom, he heard a massive bang from the entrance to the building. He was practiced enough in his craft not to jump, but he did prepare himself for what may come.

“I am Tyrant, of the House Montague! This stronghold belongs to the betrayer, Stendran Montague! Should he be here, I shall cleave his head from his torso and rend him from this plane!”

The name Tyrant didn’t ring any bells for Rizra. He hadn’t heard the name Montague either. The hiring body for this job signed that the building was owned by Fontagne Incorporated. The Fontagne Corporation hired the Rogue Guild to test their defenses, but with the clause in the contract that no other group could interfere with the test.

“That bastard is gonna lose me my contract,” he muttered quietly to himself. Rizra was angry, but he couldn’t do anything. If he intervened in any way, he would be seen by the guards and forfeit his money. If this guy made it through the whole facility destroying everything, he had a small chance of convincing them that he had done his job and someone else had interfered. That would mean he would get paid. He just had to make sure the guy didn’t screw his chance of getting paid… somehow.

“Where is the bastard?” screamed the man. “I shan’t be stopped by the likes of you!” He cleaved a charging guard across the shoulder and broke straight through the guy’s armor. These people had signed up for guard duty knowing they could be killed on the job, but cutting like that wouldn’t kill you straight away. The heavily armored man strode through the foyer without a second thought for the man he left bleeding out.

“Dost thou believe holes in the floor can stop the might of House Montague?!” the man bellowed, as he kicked a pillar down across a gap in the floor. Rizra could see from his point of view that a lever, not so cleverly concealed behind a statue, was the way to raise a bridge to cross said gap. This man was not going to like the next few halls of puzzles and traps.

Over the next four hours, Rizra watched the man kill wave after wave of beast and man alike. He struck single mighty blows against the weakest and had short lived sword fights with the strongest. He racked up a substantial kill count while only sustaining minor injuries.

Every time he came across some sort of puzzle room or obstacle that he couldn’t just kill outright, he would smash something into some the vague concept of a solution. He used that strategy to pass through the whole facility.

When at last he had finally reached the center room, he smashed down the door with a single swing of his greatsword. He stormed into the room yelling, “Stendran! Come forth and face thine doom!” Rizra watched his gaze sweep the empty room, hoping that he didn’t do anything to the card on the pillar.

“Just leave it alone,” he thought. “If he doesn’t touch the card or the pillar, I might be able to get paid.” Luck, however, is for the bards. Tyrant walked right over to the pillar and clove it in twain. He screamed what sounded like a mournful wolf howl and fell to his knees. Rizra watched him for a few moments. “If he just leaves, I might be able to tell them what happened and still get paid.”

Tyrant breathed deeply and then, using his sword as a brace, slowly stood. When he was finally to his feet, he looked down at the rubble he’d created. He reached down and lifted a small piece of parchment from the floor and read it aloud:

 

_Calling Card_

_Rogues Guild Security Testing Branch_

_“There’s no better guilding for testing your building”_

**_Ask your local guild about prices today._ **

 

“That is the dumbest rhyme I’ve ever read.” Tyrant may not have been a genius, but it didn’t take one to see how lackluster the author of the calling card quote had been. Rizra remembered telling them that they should have hired a proper bard to write the card instead of his boss Terry’s younger brother, _The Great Bardino_. He wasn’t even a real bard; he was just some sixteen year old with no job and no ambition.

“Bleeding Rogues Guild!” Tyrant screamed. “I shalln’t let this stand!” As he began to storm out, he crumpled up the card and threw it on the pile of rubble that had been a plinth of marble.

It took only a few minutes for the knight to traverse his way back out the way he came. Rizra considered killing the man for possibly ruining his job. “I could just fling a dagger through that shining fucking faceplate. He would die and I would be paid.” He carefully considered it many times on his way back though the vent. He decided against it as his best chance to still get paid was going to be leaving no trace that he had ever been there.

Besides, the client got their wish. The facility had been tested, twice in fact. It failed miserably on both counts. One rogue snuck through a vent without ever being seen, the easiest job the Security Testing Branch had ever assigned him to. Even his first job from them had been a cave filled with rats and kobolds. They smelled him half way through the cave and nearly caught him on his way out.

The second test was a live fire test with a real live adventurer. The client’s building failed that one just as spectacularly as the first.

As he climbed back out through the vent on top of the facility, he couldn’t help but wonder what the knight was going to do when he spoke to the guild and found out that this Stendran didn’t even own the facility.

*****

The next morning was shit. Rizra had to wake up early and explain to the guild exactly what happened and hope they could advocate for him to be fully paid. After waking up early to speak to his department head in Shore Stone, he slumped over to a local coffee house. Rizra had a few cups of coffee while trying to eat a funnel cake. ‘Trying’ being the operant word because every other piece he tore off was intercepted half way to his mouth by a tiny owlbear.

He chose not to chastise the little guy. Rizra was always willing to share his food, but sometimes Orcus took more than his fair share. It was too much trouble to fight him in a public area though. People tended to stare and accuse him of communing with spirits or some such nonsense. He decided it wasn’t worth it to argue long ago. Sometimes, he could swear Orcus knew he wouldn’t argue if they were in public. Clever bastard.

“Good morning, sir,” came a voice from somewhere behind him. “Do you happen to know a travel group who might be leaving town soon?”

“I don’t tend to keep up with…” Rizra’s words were cut off when he turned around and came face-to-face with the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. The wood elf was about his height. She was wearing a green dress made out of nothing but plants and leaves. He would later think on it and wonder how it didn’t just fall apart.

“That’s too bad,” she said dejectedly. “Thanks for your time.”

“Hold on there, miss.” He jumped from his seat, tipping his coffee to the floor. He might have noticed and said something about it if he hadn’t gone into full suave mode. “I just don’t keep up with the big groups. I am a one man mercenary squad and was just about to head out today. Which way are you headed, might I ask?”

She might have been more willing to fall for the suave act if she hadn’t seen the coffee and cake tumble to the floor and spread out until Rizra was standing in a puddle of steaming liquid. The big grin on his face didn’t betray a hint of pain from the near scalding heat that had definitely soaked through his cloth shoes. He knew he had screwed up, but in for a copper, in for a gold.

He kept his grin despite the pain until she looked less horrified and stammered out, “I am going north, to the big forest. I have family there.”

“I can take you there if you’d like. I was already heading that way, so I don’t even need payment. Whaddya say?”

She looked from his face to his obviously burning feet and smiled slightly. “Thanks. I am staying at the inn across the street. Just there.” She pointed to a three story building with real glass windows on every room. The though suddenly crossed Rizra’s mind that it might have been a bad idea to outright proclaim that payment wasn’t necessary. “Meet me in the restaurant on the bottom floor around 4 o’clock this afternoon. We can leave then.”

With that, she backed away awkwardly and headed toward the inn. After she had entered the doorway and disappeared into the inn, Rizra breathed a sigh of relief, then a sharp inhalation at the horrible pain in his toes. He calmly paid his bill and walked from the patio of the coffee house to the guild offices. He walked right past the front desk and down to the infirmary wing. Then, as he sat down slowly on a fluffy medical cot, he screamed like some kind of demon was trying to crawl out of him through his balls.

*****

A few hours of healing from the guild chapter’s local apothecary cleared up the boils. His toes stopped being fused together and he was able to walk with nearly a hundred percent of his normal ability. He decided that he would ride a horse for his escort mission. Walking was overrated anyway.

When 4 o’clock rolled around, he found himself in what looked less like a restaurant and more like a bar. The building looked amazing on the outside, and he conceded that maybe the rooms were immaculate, but the inside of the inn was quite shabby.

He waited only a minute before the knockout walked down from the stairway. He waited for her by the front door while she paid her room off.

Walking out together, they turned left from the front and stopped by his horse. “Do you have a horse, ma’am?”

“I have a mount, but she isn’t a horse.”

Rizra watched her walk past the line of hitched up horses. He saw a camel at the end of the line and chuckled. A camel made more sense than a horse in dry areas, but not in the forest and plains that surrounded Shore Stone. He lowered his head laughing to himself until she rode up next to him.

She wasn’t riding a camel when she came back. She was atop what looked like a glowing deer with too many antlers. She had no saddle, which may not have been impressive in itself, but she rode side-saddle with her ankle tucked behind her other foot. “Are you ready, sir?”

Rizra shook himself from his reverie. “I am, ma’am.” He clicked to his horse and they rode toward the north gates together. After a few minutes of silence, she seemed to want to ask him something.

“What is your name, sir? I must seem pretty rude for not asking before. It just slipped my mind.”

Rizra hadn’t asked her name yet either. Whoops, that was like courtesy 101. “I’m Rizra. I am a rogue from the guild of rogues. What is your name and profession?”

“I’m Caelia. I’m a healer and herbalist from the forest north of here.”

Rizra nodded his head and turned his attention back to the road. Then he turned back to her with a puzzled look on his face. “And what is that thing you’re riding?”


	3. Daliah

**Daliah**

“Gods damn you!” screamed the hunter. “You twiddle-dicks missed every single animal on this entire fucking trip. How did you ever get enough renown to be recommended by the lodge?”

“Fuck you, you stuck-up asshole! We are three of the best hunters in the lodge’s history. You’ve missed every shot you took too so don’t talk to me about accuracy.”

There was quite a bit of animosity between the four men. They had spent the last several days on a hunting trip, and they hadn’t hit a single thing with better than a glancing shot. They all had experience on their side, but they didn’t understand the situation. They couldn’t see the strings being pulled in the background.

Daliah sat chuckling quietly to herself about halfway up a tree. She stared down at the hunters from her perch fearing that one hearty laugh too much would end with her tumbling from her seat. The puppet master of the hunt was a short wood elf with long hair and very little on besides her smile. It’s not like she ran around naked everywhere. She wore clothes when she wasn’t fucking with hunters. Her clothes just made it more obvious that the animals they hunted weren’t purely animals.

The wood elf was a druid with several wild shapes. She could turn into a bear or a raven at-will. However, these two forms were the only two she turned into with earnest. Every other form she wanted to use needed her to cast a spell, and those would grant her their appearance only. She could also only turn into a creature that had granted her direct permission to use its shape. That list had grown over the years, but it still only included a short list of standard woodland critters.

The list was long enough to screw with hunters though. She would occasionally find out about hunting trips to her favorite neck of the woods and tell all of her friends to leave before the party arrived. Then, she would turn into anything that she thought they might want to kill and stand just far enough away that they could see her without shooting her. When she noticed them noticing her, she would snap her head up in a feigned panic and run away. She figured it was probably the most frustrating thing in the world for a hunter.

She sat in her tree listening to the men bicker about who was smarter for about half an hour before getting bored and scurrying away through the branches. Most sneaky people have a hard time in the forest, but druids have a hard time sneaking anywhere but. She leapt from branch to branch without making a sound and landed deftly on the ground when she finally left the hunters far enough behind.

Perception is an important trait to have for anyone choosing to live a life in the wild. It is especially important for someone who chooses to hide in the wild. The wood elf was only as observant as the next person and often forgot to look before she leapt. This normally wouldn’t have been an issue, but it is when there are five hunters and she had just fled from four.

Her deft landing was followed swiftly by a gymnastics style dismount as she bowed to the world around her in triumph. This was swiftly followed by a hammer to the back of the head mid-bow. The wood elf quickly fell to the ground and swiftly went to sleep.

*****

She awoke slowly to the sound of crackling fire and the smell of broth on the wind. She roused a bit before she realized she was tied up. It might be more accurate to say tied down. She had ropes holding her wrists together. The knot had a rope connecting it to her feet which were also tied together. Her body couldn’t stretch fully because the rope tying her ankles to her fists was making her stay in the fetal position. And finally, the ropes were attached to a wide board that had been used as a sort of caravan for the group’s heavier items when they made longer treks into the woods. She was tied down to the board and everything else had been cleared off. The implication seemed to be that they would carry her around and had no intention of letting her go.

She could see three of the men sitting around a campfire with a big pot on top. She smelled the air silently as to not alert them to her alertness. It was vegetable broth. They were making a thick stew with potatoes and something else. All she could detect were the potatoes though.

She heard a noise from behind her and made sure she looked asleep. A big thud sounded behind her head. She stayed still. The noise was followed by a small grunt and some laughter from near the fire.

“Can’t hit the broadside of a dragon and you can’t carry a measly stack of firewood. You’re as useless as I thought, Rackum.”

“I only dropped it because my hands are so weak from picking up your mom and bangin’ her against a wall all night, Pleus. She must be 400 pounds!”

A roar of laughter burst from the assembled hunters. Even the insulted party found humor in it. The elf guessed that these two men must both have been hired from the lodge together. Knowing where the fourth man was didn’t help too much because number five was nowhere in sight still. The laughter continued for a few moments and then died off.

“Your mom is so fat, kobolds once tried to use her as a boulder trap!”

“Your mom is so ugly, she turned a gorgon to stone!”

“You mom is a fucking whore!”

The laughter died immediately. “What the fuck did you say, Kinnian?!”

There was a long silence, then Pleus spoke up. “I don’t think he has this down yet, Rackum. Kinnian, I’m gonna explain this one more time. Your mom jokes are not meant to be taken seriously. They need to be seen as a statement that couldn’t possibly be applied to a real person. If I said, for instance, ‘ _Your mom is so stupid, she thought a beholder was the new apiary model,’_ that would be fine. You see what I’m saying?”

Another long pause was followed by what the elf assumed must have been Kinnian nodding his assent and Rackum sitting back down; she couldn’t see Kinnian from where she was, only his shadow. The joke faux pas must have ruined the repartee because the ‘your mom’ jokes stopped. They were replaced by Pleus poking the fourth man in the arm.

“You gonna eat with us tonight, or do you still prefer your wheat bar things?”

“I don’t have many left because I expected to kill something by now. I will have to eat with you if I am going to have food for the ride home.” This must have been the guy that hired them. He seemed to be stand-offish toward the men and didn’t join in their conversation.

“You’re in luck then. I made enough for five tonight.” Pleus stood and walked over to the pot. He gave it a few quick stirs and pulled the ladle to his lips. He tasted it, added something to it, tasted it again, and then tapped the pot with the spoon. “More luck for you tonight. Dinner’s ready.”

Everyone stood slowly and walked over to the pot. The elf could see them all more clearly now that they stood next to a fire with nothing blocking her view. The one who had captured her wasn’t any of the three named men. She also knew that it couldn’t be lord douche-nozzle because he had been arguing with Pleus when she fled through the trees earlier. The sneaky one needed to show up before she could attempt escape. If she could just wait for them to sleep, maybe she could shift into a raven and get away then.

Luck wasn’t on her side though. She watched them sleep on nights previous. They were always careful to have someone on watch. Now, with a prisoner tied down to their caravan board, they were doubly cautious. Two of the four stayed on watch and number five didn’t even show up. The elf thought this was rude, considering Pleus claimed he had made enough food for five.

It was about eleven, judging by the moon, when number five finally showed up. He climbed down from a tree on the other side of the camp from her. He made no sounds during his descent. The man was definitely sneaky. That made her feel better. At least she had been caught by someone capable. It would be embarrassing if the one named Kinnian had taken her down. He was obviously kinda new at this whole thing.

Number five walked to the fire, filled a bowl with soup, and then sat down on a log with his back to her. This seemed to be her best chance all night. She couldn’t shift into any of her friends’ forms because her spells required her hands, so she would have to turn into either a bear to kill everyone, or a raven and escape.

The men weren’t inept. They hadn’t killed anything because she had warned all of the animals away. They had nearly killed her as an elk, a deer, and a squirrel on several occasions. So bear seemed like it needed to be taken off the table. She certainly could take out one or two, three if she was lucky, but not all five guys fully decked out in armor.

Her dilemma seemed to be solved. Raven was the only way. She pushed her breasts together and tucked her knees up as far as they would go. She needed to get small because the displaced air from growing larger or the air instantly filling a gap left behind as she shrank would be loud. She needed to take up as little space as possible to reduce the noise from the shift. When her knees touched her chin, she breathed out until she felt she couldn’t possibly take up any less space without crawling inside herself.

With as quiet a pop as she had ever made, she became a raven. She hopped off the board and skulked away from the hunters’ fire. Number five must have been tired. He didn’t even turn around. The two on watch had taken up points facing directions that the raven was not going. As she slowly walked backwards from the fire, she raised her wings in front of her face. She figured the shiny beak would give her away if they turned around, but the pitch black wings might make it harder to spot her.

She got about forty feet away from the camp when she heard a rustle behind her. She whipped around to see a short dark skinned elf with bright purple hair, dark leather armor, and an assortment of ranged weapons strapped to her. She placed a finger on her lips and whipped two crossbows from her belt.

“I will be right back,” she said, letting out a slow breath. With that, she stood up and charged the campsite.

*****

It had only taken about thirty silent seconds for the woman to kill every one of the hunters. She started with Kinnian and Pleus because they were on guard. They stood parallel to each other facing opposite directions. The two crossbows fired simultaneously and the raven watched bolts rip through skulls and leave the mouths of the two men. Next was the only half alert number five. He jumped to his feet and spun 180 degrees while drawing his sword. He landed ready to fight, but his eyes had to adjust to the darkness before he could see the threat. The dark elf had already readied her long bow by the time he jumped. She let an arrow fly and he nearly dodged it. He would have succeeded had he not bumped into someone. The arrow struck him in the shoulder instead of the heart, but it would have been better if he hadn’t dodged at all.

The groggy man who stood up and blocked number five’s dodge only barely seemed awake enough to realize something was wrong. Being jumped on by a man he had been paying to hunt with was jarring, but not as jarring as having that same man fall backwards with force and land on a scalding hot pot of soup and roll off of it into a fire.

The hunt benefactor scrambled to his feet, presumably to help get the man out of the fire. He got one step towards the pot before another arrow flew out of the woods and split the man’s lips from the back of his skull.

The burning number five let out a scream of pain and woke up the last guy. Rackum was obviously a soldier at some point because he was instantly awake. Three arrows flew to his face, but all were blocked by a heavy oaken shield. He jumped to his feet only to have them shot out from under him. He fell forward shoving them in further and breaking them inside his legs. Before he could yell out, he dropped his shield and had an arrow go through his eye.

The screams of number five ended abruptly as a new bolt was loaded into a wrist crossbow and fired through his brain.

When it was all over, the raven sat down with her mouth agape. She dropped her wings to her sides and stared at the elf who was retrieving bolts and arrows that still had value. The woman spoke softly to herself as she plucked arrow shafts from bodies.

After getting her ammo back, she started to dig through the men’s stuff. She searched fastidiously as she rummaged through sacks. She suddenly stopped and looked at the raven. “How rude of me. You should get first dibs. They did have you tied up after all.”

The raven shook the shock from her head and stood back up. Shifting required that she remain that way for at least a few minutes before shifting back, so the raven walked slowly towards the camp. She hopped onto a log and sat down. “CAW!” she said, in what she had thought would be a quiet voice.

“You don’t have enough experience to shift back soon after changing? That makes some sense.” The woman moved over to the log opposite the raven and sat down. She seemed to be somewhat shy, an odd feat to pull off right after saving someone’s life. “He didn’t quite knock this pot over and it does smell good. Would you like some soup?”

After a few minutes of pecking her beak into a bowl of vegetable soup, the raven felt the familiar strength of will return to her wings. She hopped off the log and spread her wings wide in order to be as big as possible before changing. She didn’t have to be quiet, but she was used to trying to be as silent as possible when shifting.

There was a loud whooshing noise followed by a pop. She stood and stretched her fingers and toes for a second.

“So what’s your name?” asked Daliah.

“I’m Ahria. And yours?”

“I’m Daliah.”

“Why did they have you tied up and naked? Or is that none of my business?”

“They didn’t… You know what, it’s a long story.”

Daliah told Ahria about the last few days while they both finished off the soup. They laughed about her turning into a wolf and stealing the men’s underpants one night. She finally got up to being captured and Ahria looked like everything had just been made clear.

“I’m lucky you showed up. I assumed the place would be entirely deserted after I told everyone to leave.” Daliah slurped what remained of her bowl of broth.

Ahria had loosened up a bit from the soup and the storytelling. “I got here a few hours ago. I was walking through the plain east of here a few days ago when I saw a big family of mice sitting by the edge of the woods. They were just playing and minding their own business, but they were forest mice, so I thought it was odd. I walked over and noticed they weren’t alone. Predators and prey were all playing and eating together in a big party just outside the forest. I decided it was too strange to ignore, so I came in to see why they would all leave the forest in the first place.”

“I do this every once in a while. I don’t always hear about hunts ahead of time, but when I do, I get everyone out.”

The two elves sat in silence for a few moments. Then Ahria spoke up. “With these guys dead, what do you think will happen?”

Daliah’s face turned sullen. “The hunting lodge isn’t a heartless or mindless organization. They’ll send more people out to find their brothers. It’s why I don’t usually kill them. That guy,” she pointed down at the hunt benefactor, “probably had lots of money and a family. They’ll send people out here to find them. I’ll have to drag the bodies out of the forest and put them by the road. When I kill hunters here, I use my claws and it just looks like a hunting trip went wrong. Arrow wounds mean I can easily make it look like a robbery went wrong instead.”

“I can help you with that.”

“I appreciate it. I’ll start getting everything ready in the morning. We can probably sleep here tonight and finish moving the bodies by tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow night? The road is more than a day’s walk if you keep a quick pace, two or three days if not. We’re two elves, and you look about as much a body builder as I do. How are we supposed to get five bodies and all the loot out of the woods in under a day? Shifting into a small creature like a raven won’t help much either.”

“I have two shift forms.”

“Only two? I though you shifters had tons.”

“I haven’t had the time to master more than two and I could only truly master the one. The one I mastered perfectly is a grizzly bear though. These guys had been using this board as a way to drag their stuff around. We’ll just have to make a harness that’ll fit my bear neck, pun fully intended, and I’ll drag everything. All this stuff will weigh nothing to me.”

“That does make it easier.”

“I can carry around more than 800 pounds without a problem. These five guys together probably weigh about 650 to 700. All the stuff added in, plus you if you need a break from walking, means I won’t move at full pace, but it won’t slow me down much.”

They worked out the details and decided to start going through the loot before they left in the morning. They stayed up and talked for a bit after that. It had been months since Daliah had spoken to another person. She had been in the forest protecting the creatures from hunters and other dangers since her family moved away.

Living in the forest with her dad and her cousins had been her whole life. They decided it was time to move back to the part of the forest near the sea. Daliah hadn’t wanted to go though. Her friends, the animals, were too important. Talking to someone in a language that didn’t require squeaks or squawks was pretty nice though.

An hour passed before they got tired. Ahria grabbed one of the bedrolls and crawled in. Nights were chilly when she wore no clothes, so Daliah spread her arms and legs wide and turned into her bear form.

They woke up around nine or ten and Daliah turned back into an elf to help pack all of the loot and the bodies onto the board. When they were ready to set out, she turned back into her bear form. Ahria tied a harness around Daliah’s neck and torso for the trip. Daliah noticed that the ropes were far more comfortable than any harness she had tied for herself before.

“Ready to go?” asked Ahria.

“GRAWR!” Daliah gently affirmed.


	4. Isilude

**Isilude**

“Thank you, kind wizard.” The farmer bowed low and lay a small sack of golden coins on the ground in front of the tall man. The high elf mage stood resplendently above the man and his family with a glowing staff and his eyes literally blazing with fire.

“You have your live-stock. Now you may leave, peasant.” The voice produced by the elf was unlike any normal elf. It was at least an octave deeper and sounded like several people spoke at once.

“Yes sir, bless you,” stammered the farmer as he quickly stood and dragged the goats from the hut.

The door slammed shut behind the farmer and his family. Slamming the door was something Isilude had told his clients not to do. The door slamming forced the fire in front of his eyes to blow back a bit and singe his eyebrows. This time wasn’t any different. He quickly backed away from the mechanism that produced the fire, but not quickly enough to avoid being burned. This time, it got his lashes as well.

“I really must remember to install some sort of mechanism to keep the door from slamming.” Then he began coughing. The spell he used to lower his voice wasn’t an effect. It really slackened his vocal chords magically, which made his voice lower temporarily. As soon as the sun reached the top of his western window, which was mostly covered by eaves, his cosmetic spells wore off for the evening. If that goat farmer and his family hadn’t been staples of this peasant community, he wouldn’t have been helping them this late in the afternoon.

His voice layering spell wore off as well and his coughing grew more aggressive. The voice layering spell was actually a small echo cantrip, but he used it almost exclusively inside his throat. It made his voice sound like a small chorus, but it didn’t amplify it or make it seem as though it was coming from multiple directions. This method of voice alteration had been used by huckster mages for generations. It could have dangerous effects if one were to make a mistake in casting, but Isilude was no novice.

He walked to a basin and grabbed the ewer. He gulped water scoop after scoop for a few seconds. The tickle in his throat was finally driven away and he sat down at the table with assorted alchemical ingredient bottles, bottles with nothing in them. Every alchemy bottle contained a small amount of red powder at the bottom. The powder was used as an illusion catalyst. Illusions don’t generally require catalysts to exist, but long term ones do. Isilude cast a new illusion spell on each bottle every day. He also cast illusion spells on the jars and cages scattered around the hut.

Each day, he would cast illusions into every container in the hut. These illusions were of rare ingredients that no one in the village had ever seen or heard of. Nobody could ask him about his tickle-leaf if they had never seen nor heard of it. The cages appeared filled with hideous animals, but to be honest, even the hideous animal illusions were actually farm animals, though they were the farm animals of orcs. People just assumed that he had dangerous creatures, so they would never try to break into his shack and steal his stuff.

There wasn’t anything to steal though. The bottles, jars, cages, boxes, shelves, dresser, and the footlocker were all empty. Isilude didn’t have anything in his shack except empty containers and a few mechanisms.

He breathed for a few moments, then stood and walked over to lock the door. Then he stepped over to the gas controller for his eye flames, which were still burning. He turned the gas off as he watched the flames die down. He then walked over to the device and flicked a small flame from his fingertips like a lighter and held it up to the spouts. The gas bleeding from the lines sputtered the flame before petering out.

“Sigh,” he said to himself. He cracked his knuckles and stretched his back out. “I really need a spell for all this.” He scratched his chin under his long beard, then removed his long beard. Isilude had never been able to grow facial hair, but then so few high elves could. For some reason though, people didn’t care to deal with a Summoner who didn’t have a beard. His beard was long and blonde to match his long ponytail, which he also removed. To be fair, high elves were quite good at growing long hair, Isilude just had a hard time growing it long anymore.

A fellow wizard and he had a long standing feud. The pranks were always mean spirited, but never physically damaging. A recent prank had left him with singed hair. A bag of igni was placed in his pillow. When he lay down to sleep, the weight of his head set off the proximity rune on the bag. His head went up in a gout of flame. It burned off much of his hair and left him with having to get a buzz cut.

This seemed to be the long standing result of pranks on his end, trying to remove his hair that is. His side of the fight tended to target the man’s fingers. Isilude’s most recent prank had been to replace his rival’s gloves with half transmogrified razor-moles. The chances of his rival having his hands entirely eaten were low, but he probably wouldn’t know that.

Isilude chuckled to himself as he threw the wig and fake beard to the bed. He had been eagerly awaiting the end of the day for quite a while. Not just because he hated peasants, not just because he hated being outside the city of Aerial Rock, and not just because work sucked and he wanted it to be over. His latest prank was set in motion that morning and it had been a cold day in Aerial Rock. He really wanted to see the result.

His chuckle became a grin that wouldn’t go away. He hopped up and clicked his heels before waving away his illusions around the shack. He grabbed his fake hair and pulled a pinch of some kind of powder from his robe. He sprinkled it on a painted square in the corner of the room before walking onto the square and whispering a short incantation. With a loud pop, he was whisked away from the plains and the village.

*****

As soon as he stepped off his teleport square at home in Aerial Rock, Isilude was greeted by a bolt of electricity arcing its way around the floor about a foot outside the protection circle. It isn’t smart to paint a teleport square on the floor without protection. So Isilude had placed a protection circle all the way around his teleport square, his bed, and his dresser. The circle would prevent spells from being launched inward and halt sustained spells from having any lasting effect inside the circle.

“How was your day, dear?” came an angry voice from the front room. Isilude put his head around the corner to see Thranduil sitting at his table with a dark gleam in his cat eyes. Vampires’ eyes turn yellow and the irises get narrow. They don’t actually look anything like cat eyes, but Isilude had always called them that to piss off the vampire. “I just loved the present you left for me this morning. Fur is so chic.” The venom in his voice was impossible not to hear. He said every word as though it held liquid death.

“I thought your old gloves looked haggard. I was only looking out for my best friend.”

Thranduil twitched slightly. “My hands could have been ripped off, or eaten.” The venom remained in his words. “You have gone too far this time.”

“You set my head on fire not two nights ago!”

“That bag of igni was too small to do any real damage. The most it would have done is scar your face. Plus you filled my house with dire chickens last week!”

“The razor-mole gloves would have stopped at bone. And you were the one who turned my girlfriend into a vampire last month!”

“She’s in a better relationship now, with a peasant who’s enthralled to her.”

The two wizards stared at each other. The venom was gone, replaced by shouting. The fake smiles had been replaced by less literal flames in their eyes. The staring contest lasted for about a minute.

“I’m going to get undressed. Go away.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Your circle may protect you in there, but I can wait here until you come out.”

“Suit yourself.” Isilude removed his robes and stood there nude in the doorway. He shook his cock at the other mage and laughed at the disgusted scowl he was given in return. He stepped to his closet and grabbed a clean set of robes. Then he farted and cast a short gust of air cantrip to blow the smell into the front room. He listened to the air for a moment and heard a gag from the doorway.

“You little shit. This is just getting worse for you the longer you stay in there.”

Isilude laughed and walked over to his window. He checked the window for sustained magic. It would have been rather disappointing to try escaping only to find himself caught in one of his enemy’s traps. He saw a miniscule bolt of lightning crawling its way around the sill. He dispelled it quietly and cast a self-duplicate. He made it walk over to the doorway and then jump beside the frame as though preparing to start a duel. He heard his dining table flip on its side and knew Thranduil had leapt behind it.

Isilude opened the window and climbed down to the ground from his second story. When he touched the ground, he heard a _whoosh_ noise. A giant purple sphere erupted around him. The bubble was imbedded in the ground underneath it and stretched to about ten feet across. His bedroom window faced the street, so people were walking all around as it happened. High elves, for the most part, had learned that if you see some magic happening on a small scale, it’s probably a feud and not to mess with it.

Thranduil stepped around the corner and smiled. “You should have just given up this fight a long time ago.” He stepped up to the purple bubble and tapped it like a shitty kid with a fish aquarium. When he tapped the sphere, it echoed loudly throughout, as though someone were rapping on a chamber door. “You are gonna love it in there, buddy. Best get used to it, too. That bubble is set to dispel after two hundred years.” He threw his head back in laughter. As he turned to go, Isilude began laughing as well.

“What are you laughing at?” asked the vampire elf, his fangs now showing.

“You. You set this thing to catch me, but didn’t think that I might have my staff or my wand on me.”

Thranduil smiled. “Those won’t do you any good. I used up several days of mana building this thing.”

“Oh, I can tell. I couldn’t break out if I tried. I’m guessing you have some way to keep me from starving or dying of thirst. You wouldn’t want me to die quickly.”

Thranduil looked at Isilude dubiously. “The sphere is sustained by mana. It draws it from the target, but exchanges vitality. You won’t need food or drink. You’ll just survive.” His smile had faded to a small scowl. Isilude knew that he didn’t like explaining things, but he also knew that he couldn’t help it. If Thranduil thought he had missed something at the beginning of the conversation, he was certain of it now. “Why are you still smiling? You will be trapped for centuries.”

“No reason. I can hear and speak through this thing, I won’t die, I know it will last for two hundred years, what else am I missing?”

“You can’t leave the spot you’re standing on. The furthest you can go is the edge of the sphere. It’s rooted to the ground. If somehow, you were to get someone to dig out the bottom of it from the spot it formed, it would sink further down.”

“Good to know,” Isilude said without dropping his smile.

“Then why are you so gods damned happy?” The venom had seeped back into Thranduil’s voice.

“You’ll see.”

Thranduil looked confused for a second, but seemed to decide not to give Isilude the satisfaction of seeing it. He turned to leave. When he finally looked away from his trap, he realized the world had gone purple. His confusion faded to understanding tinged with denial. “This isn’t real. You cast an illusion around me.”

“Now how could I do that? You said yourself that this thing feeds on mana. I could no more cast an illusion than summon a dragon.”

Thranduil walked over to the bubble’s interior wall and tapped it. The amplified sound echoed back, and the tap on the wall electrocuted him. He jumped a bit at the shock.

“Another good piece of information,” chuckled Isilude. “I didn’t know touching the inside would shock me. Thanks for the warning.”

“What have you done, you bastard?!”

“I saw the Sphere coming up and accepted my fate instantly. With my last second of power, I used all the mana in my wand and staff to cast reflection. I knew you would come up and tap the bubble. You used some of your own mana to cast the bubble around yourself. I think it’s fitting that, if I get stuck here, we both do.”

Thranduil’s denial fell into anger. He pounded the ground in frustration. “You’ll never get away with this.”

“I know. You made sure I won’t get away with anything. I will succeed without leaving this spot. The best part is…” he said as he summoned a chicken, “I have a few enchanted items with me.” He sat down and broke the chicken’s neck. He pulled out a small sack from his robes and placed it on the ground. He pulled a grill out and began plucking the chicken. “I would offer you some, but you’re trapped in a two century long bubble spell and expected me to go insane over time. I don’t think that’s neighborly enough behavior to warrant some of my chicken.”

*****

Ten hours passed before anyone thought to question the two elves sitting on the side of the street. The bubbles were so large that they blocked the walkway and it started to bother people when the sun started to rise.

“Getting toasty over there, cock…, I mean, _blood_ sucker?”

The vampire groaned. “The bubble feeds vitality, so it heals at a slow pace. You won’t get rid of me that easily. It might itch a bit, but I will live here as long as you.”

“More good information.”

Ten more hours passed before anyone reported what was going on. The council of Magi for Aerial Rock heard and decided to see what the core of the problem was.

An ancient looking high elf wizard with a beard walked up to the bubbles. He closed his eyes and spoke under his breath. When his eyes opened, they were as white as pearls. They flicked from side to side as though he were reading the spell.

Thranduil groaned. Isilude laughed. He knew Thranduil didn’t like the council any more than he did. They had both been in trouble every other day for fighting when they attended the academy together. The council only begrudgingly graduated them after they passed all their exams. Having some council member come down to fix one of their screw ups was a horrible feeling. Isilude looked over at Thranduil and saw the pain and anger in his cat eyes.

“Don’t worry, suck face. I’m sure they can get me out in no time. You may be stuck in your own spell as a punishment, but I should be fine.”

The vampire scowled at him and lay down on the sidewalk.

“I’m afraid it may be quite a bit worse than that,” said the ancient one.

It was Isilude’s turn to look dour. “You mean his spell is too strong for the council to dispel?”

“Of course not,” laughed the mage. “This spell is so weak, a trainee could break it given a few days. No, I’m afraid the council may have other plans for you two than saving you from you own petard.” With that, his eyes went back to their normal green color and he turned to walk back up the street.

Another day crept past. It crawled by for the two wizards because they had nothing to do. Studying was the past-time of mages because it kept them sharp and up to date on the best spells to use for what situations. They also both drank in bars across town from each other most nights. Isilude wished he had brought some reading material with him when he jumped out the window.

After another two days of sitting in the sunny street, sweating and waiting for the council to decide what it wanted to do with them, a wood elf apprentice showed up in the official court garb of the council. It had way too many green tassels and a cape that dragged the ground due to the diminutive stature of the lad wearing it. He walked cautiously up to the bubbles and waved at Isilude and Thranduil with a kind smile. Isilude rolled his eyes. He despised the other races a bit. Especially humans, but wood elves weren’t far behind. Thranduil wasn’t fond of them either. It was one of the very few things they actually agreed upon.

“Hello, master wizards. I am apprentice Siland. I have been sent by the council to read their decision in the case of _Mages Council of Aerial Rock VS the mages Isilude & Thranduil_. It is as follows. ‘Both have been found guilty of reckless endangerment of the citizenry. Both have been found guilty of reckless use of magic. Both have been found guilty of casting dangerous spells in the city limits of Aerial Rock.’ Do either defendant have anything to say before sentencing is carried out?”

The smile never left his face. It wasn’t a smile of malice, though. It was obvious that he was just excited to be there.

“I have something to ask,” said Thranduil. “How do they expect an apprentice to carry out the sentence and how do they expect a wood elf to have enough mana to get us out of these spheres?”

The smile wavered only a bit on the small man’s face. He must have been getting used to the racism of a high elf city. High elves tended to be inclusive and allow other races equality, but they never got away from calling them lesser races.

The wood elf stood a little straighter. He breathed deeply and slowly grew into an imposing dark elf. The figure stared down at the sitting high elves and spoke softly. “I had hoped that you wouldn’t say that.”

“Your punishment has been a matter of debate amongst the council. I was in favor of labor in the kitchens at the academy. You would be taught a bit of humility. The other members told me that I didn’t know you like they did. I thought maybe a happy wood elf would be just the face to make you respond with kindness instead of vitriol. I am sorry to say that the council’s decision was that if you seemed to lack remorse and humility from your three day imprisonment that perhaps the imprisonment would need to be extended. You will remain trapped in the prisons of your own making.”

“You can’t just leave us here,” countered Isilude. He looked smugly at the master. “We’re blocking a street and causing an inconvenience. Isn’t that a few chapters into the rule book? ‘Magical inconveniences will not be tolerated.’” He knew it was there. It had been quoted to them on more than a few occasions during school.

“You are correct.” With those words, the prisons popped out of existence. As soon as the two wizards made to stand, they too popped out of existence.

When they reappeared, they were back in the purple bubbles, but they were standing in the middle of a huge crowd of novices and apprentices. They were encircled by every member of the academy as well as all the teachers and masters working there.

The dark elf master reappeared and summoned a young wood elf to his side. “This is Siland. He is a real student here in the academy. When he has become a master of this academy, you will be re-judged.” A roar of laughter echoed around the courtyard. They were standing in the main courtyard of the academy. Glancing around told Isilude that the two of them had replaced the statue of the founding master wizards. The new center piece of the quad was the pair of troublemakers.

Siland bowed to the two of them. “I will learn everything I can, as quickly as I can. I won’t let you down.” The laughter nearly drowned him out. The dark elf master shook his head solemnly and guided the students away.

*****

Days passed slowly in their prisons. After a few weeks, Siland began coming by to ask the two wizards questions and ask for tips. They would scowl at him and show him how to do simple things. Isilude hated people and suspected Thranduil was getting hungry for them.

Weeks became months became years. The two watched Siland become an apprentice and take on a specialty. He chose alchemy, so neither of them could be of any help. Isilude had been terrible at alchemy, and he knew Thranduil was too. One thing they did know was that becoming a master alchemist was the hardest possible specialty and it took decades of practice to progress.

Decades passed into a century. Siland became a journeyman and began teaching apprentices. He still came by every month or so to talk to the prisoners. They had scowled less and less as the years went by. They now lived for the days when he came by to talk to them about alchemy. He used terms they had never heard of and talked about possible topics for his master’s piece. They began to like him and treasure his visits.

After about 150 years of training, he stopped coming by to see them. Isilude thought he understood. It made sense to focus on his studies. He was trying to become a master of the academy as soon as possible. Then, one day, the dark elf master approached them.

“I have good news and bad news.” The wizards stood and Isilude got a sickening feeling in his gut. “The good news is,” he waved his hands and the bubbles disappeared. Thranduil cowered back at the sting of the sunlight without his bubble to protect him. A thick cloud formed over their heads with another word from the master. “The bad news is Siland has gone missing.” Isilude felt like he had been gutted. His feeling towards this young man had slowly gone from outright irritation to genuine affection.

“What happened?” asked Thranduil.

“He was studying for his masterpiece ceremony a few days ago. He never came out of his room that night. When we went to check on him, he was gone. We have decided that he earned his status as a master, so you two are free to go.”

“Are there any clues as to where he went?” asked Isilude.

The master cocked an eyebrow. “You wish to search for him?”

“I have grown accustomed to his face. I would like to see that he is unharmed.”

“Very well. He seems to have left via magic as no one saw him leaving the grounds. He was teleported out from his offices. If you truly wish to find him, you have the support of the council to search.”

“I’m going with you,” chimed in Thranduil. “I too have grown accustomed to his face.”

“I think you two have quite a lot of work to do. I will show you to his quarters.”


	5. Mara

**Mara**

Mara Jadis and Riverblossom Greenleaf were a pair of roving thieves. They worked by stealing things that looked to have some sort of value, and they sold those things to anyone willing to pay for them. This is the standard definition of thief. The only difference was that they stole things even though it made them less money than their previous jobs.

Mara had once been a not-so-renowned caster. Her spells didn’t heal or summon things people needed though. She fought people in the magic arena of Shylial. She fought well enough to have a nice place to live and plenty of food. Once a week, a new combatant would show up to the arena and they would summon Mara to fight them. She was the first round combatant. That meant that instead of working her way up through the ranks to become champion, she would fight the lowest group of fighters vying for that role.

Riverblossom was an orphan who grew up to be a shop owner. She ran a bakery/art house/bar/brothel. Sometimes those things mixed to strange effect. Her place, called the Drunken Whore Bread Portrait (she got the name from a particularly drunk early patron), was popular. It was four stories of rooms, open floor space, and bars filled with kegs and vintages. Money flowed in on the reg.

Why then would two well taken care of go-getters become thieves, scraping together food and some cash when they could? It wasn’t some tragic accident or a threatening bully. It was whimsy.

Riverblossom saw Mara sitting at the bar on the ground floor one evening. “Hi, honey. You look good. How was work?”

“Amazing! I got to train a new kid for my job. They need so many of us that I am getting some new recruits. They’re even letting me start a team to fight team battles in the arena. It was all my idea and they finally had the money to listen.”

“That’s great! Drink free tonight.”

“I drink free every night, Granny.”

“Shhhh! Keep your voice down. Don’t let the other patrons hear you say that.”

“You’re the one that keeps bragging about your granddaughter and announcing why I get free drinks,” chuckled Mara through her mug of Amber Bliss.

“I never,” Riverblossom started quietly, “BRAG ABOUT MY AMAZING GRANDDAUGHTER WHO DRINKS FREE ’CAUSE SHE’S AWESOME!” A cheer rang throughout the ground floor.

“That’s three, boys!” yelled a well-dressed regular. Since Riverblossom did this so often, it had become a game of the wealthier patrons to bet on how many times she would say it throughout the evening. Starting at one PM, every time she loudly proclaimed anything positive about Mara and mentioned her drinking for free, they would add a one to the counter board they donated to the establishment. A person bet on a particular number and, if they were right by midnight, everyone else who bet covered their tab that night. No one ever bet lower than five, because that was a waste of money.

The night continued on with people fucking upstairs, people painting out on the balconies, and people drinking everywhere. There were games for those activities as well. If you could make any of the whores scream in pleasure, a difficult feat with those particular people, you got your lay for free. If you could take Riverblossom’s breath away with your picture, your art got added to the gallery on the open space top floor. The place was always busy and always doing well.

The end of that night, about three or four AM, rolled around. Mara looked at Riverblossom while she swept. She had been sober all night, despite drinking heavily. She didn’t really get drunk anymore, unless she was hitting a particularly heavy bottle. As Riverblossom got rid of the last bit of dust on the floor, she closed the doors and turned to see Mara watching her. “What?”

“We should leave and become thieves.”

“Sounds fun.”

So they did.

A few months later, they were sitting at a crossroads waiting for a convoy to come by.

They had been waiting on this particular convoy since they spotted it the night before and took a short cut to get hours ahead. The road only went to this one intersection and it was impossible for them to take it off the road because the forest was too dense in this area. Mara and Riverblossom set up camp and slept until about eight AM.

They had awoken with the sunlight cascading down through the limbs. The area had still been dark due to the thickness of the foliage, but the light had been bright enough to wake them. They packed up and walked to the crossroad through the forest. They then waited for several hours.

“What time is it, Granny?” The sun was high in the sky. Mara was trying to figure out how long they still had to wait before their query arrived.

“I’m not sure, baby girl. Looks like it’s about 11 or 12. We still have quite a while until they get here.” Mara already knew this. She asked to pass the time.

Granny could pass the time by talking to the squirrels who ran up to sit with her. Mara knew that she couldn’t talk to squirrels. Granny wasn’t old or demented, she just kinda started doing things because she wanted to. This meant that sometimes she did things that she had never tried before because it seemed like fun. “Cynthia says they’ll be here in about three or four hours. Her family spotted them on the road and said that they were moving fairly slowly.”

Mara smiled and rolled her eyes. Granny was right about how long it would be. She used her own information to claim that the squirrels, birds, lizards, or even bugs had told her fresh information. It was obvious from where they saw the caravans last night that they wouldn’t get to the crossroads until after noon. It was also obvious that they had a slow lead cart and that it would probably be hours longer before they got there.

“I’m gonna go for a walk. I’ll be back before they get here.” With that, Mara stood and walked up the road left of the road the convoy would be arriving on. She walked through the thick forest, staring off into the trees and lost in her own thoughts. She thought about the job she’d left behind.

She had walked into the main office and handed the boss a note with her plan to leave and travel for a while. He’d laughed and shook her hand. He called her crazy and told her to keep the leather armor she used in the arena. It was enchanted by the arena enchanter, the boss’s little brother. It made her seem like a piece of the shadows in the arena. If the sun was anywhere but noonish, she was nearly invisible to the untrained eye.

She told him thanks and suggested that she be replaced by him. “You’ve wanted to get down there and fight for too long. On a team versus low level opponents is the perfect chance for you to do it without risking your health too much.” He considered it for a few moments and agreed that it would be fun.

He was a mountain of a man. A minotaur with horns that went to the sides very briefly before curving back in and jutting straight forward. He didn’t fit in most normal rooms, so he designed the arena rooms with vaulted ceilings so he could fit. People told him it was ingenious and that it would make the place survive a hurricane, but he just liked being able to walk from room to room without bumping his head like he did everywhere else.

“Try not to kill any newbies,” she said before walking back out the door and leaving town with Riverblossom.

She must have walked for about an hour when she decided to turn around. The forest had thinned out considerably in this direction. She could see the sky easily through the branches. It reminded her of the day she met Riverblossom.

She was about 50 years old when she met Riverblossom. They both walked into the same apothecary looking for bee venom. There was one vial left, so naturally Mara told Riverblossom that she needed it for a dying relative. She hadn’t needed it for a dying relative, she wanted to fix her joint pain from clutching a dagger so long that her tendons seemed to think a hand should be shaped like a hook.

Riverblossom consented to let her take it. Mara felt bad, so she took her for a drink. The trees around the small town were dying because a strangely dry season had begun. She remembered the two of them getting drunk and passing out. They woke up naked in the middle of the woods. They didn’t know exactly why they were naked, but Mara suspected they had just gotten hot and stripped before passing out on far sides of the campfire. She was shocked that she had been able to make a campfire, but considering how awful the pile looked, she wasn’t too surprised.

Riverblossom put her clothes back on quickly after they found them. Mara thought it was funny how modest she was being considering they looked around for the clothes for a good half hour before finding them. She called her Granny for being so modest. Riverblossom was taken aback. Mara thought she might have gone too far, so she apologized for saying it. But Riverblossom hadn’t stopped staring at her. Her faced slowly changed from shock to exaggerated happiness. She ran at Mara who, in her surprise, wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way.

Instead of being tackled and beaten, something she had thought was likely at this point, she was grasped tightly in a hug. Mara stood there for a moment being held. She heard the sobs from the woman gripping her. “My granddaughter.” Mara was confused. She was certainly not this woman’s granddaughter. For one, Mara was a dark elf and Riverblossom was a wood elf. Secondly, Mara was from the opposite side of the continent from Riverblossom. And finally, Mara was 50 while Riverblossom was only 20. 20 year olds should not have grandchildren, especially when they had never had children in the first place.

Mara chuckled to herself as she thought about that morning. She had woken up naked before, so that part wasn’t too weird. She had still thought it was going to be the strangest part of her day. Becoming the granddaughter of someone 30 years her junior was the oddest thing that had ever happened to her, though.

She had tried convincing Riverblossom that it was a joke. She just said, “That’s my granddaughter. Always making jokes.” After a few minutes, she took it for a lost cause and decided to get back to her life. Riverblossom followed her. Every time Mara asked her about a life she had to get back to, Riverblossom responded with, “My family is my life.”

They had been travelling together for about ten years before they settled in that town with nice jobs and good lives. They lived there for another ten before leaving.

She finally made her way back to the crossroad about 2:30. The convoy still had a while to go. Riverblossom was now talking to a line of ants that was dragging crumbs she laid out for them. “Do you think the plague is dangerous to people too?”

“What plague?” asked Mara.

“They told me that their colony has been struck by a plague. It has made them all sickly. I crumbled up some of our bread and gave it to them, but it won’t be enough to save them.”

Mara knelt down close to the ground. She looked at the ants as they marched by. They were pale alright. She could tell they weren’t okay. Something had gone wrong with the queen, she was sure; they wouldn’t last long.

They stood up and brushed themselves off. After checking to see if any of the colony had accidently joined them, they walked into the woods off the road to sit and wait. They talked about their plans for what to do after they hit the convoy. They had no idea, but they knew they wanted beds for a few nights.

After about an hour, they heard hooves. As they drew slowly closer, the two crouched down and pulled up their hoods. Mara’s hood was a part of the enchanted armor she was granted by the arena. Riverblossom’s was just a raggedy old brown thing made out of burlap. She didn’t need enchantments to hide herself.

The carts were more like covered wagons. In fact, they were entirely covered. You couldn’t see the cargo in any of the carts. The convoy had seven wagons in all and each one had a driver and a navigator. That’s actually the reason they decided to hit this convoy in the first place. The slow pace would make it seem as though they were just transporting normal goods, but no one needs two people for each cart. It screams out that the convoy needs extra protection.

The front cart was heaviest. It had metal axels and metal wheels. They looked a bit rusty, but it was obvious upon close inspection that there was a pattern to the rust. Riverblossom had told Mara that they had been carefully rusted in certain spots as to appear weather worn. They got a decent look when they spotted the convoy taking a break. A cart that heavy and a caravan that paranoid meant soldiers in the front cart.

The last six wagons each had strong wooden wheels, so the cargo wasn’t incredibly light, but it wasn’t as heavy as the soldiers. It was impossible to tell what it was though.

When the wagons were just about to pass, Mara and Riverblossom sprang from the trees in total silence. They used the shadows of the afternoon in the deep woods to conceal themselves. They got to the two rear carts without anyone noticing. Mara jumped in the one in front. She rummaged through the cluster of crates and found a few silver trinkets. For the most part, though, she found straw in the boxes. She pocketed the silver and climbed out the other side, ready to move up to the next wagon.

She moved quickly to the trees so the rear waggoneers didn’t have time to see through her enchantments. Riverblossom wouldn’t need to worry about that, but Mara knew they could see the movements she made if they had enough time. She dropped the silver stuff in a small pile before leaping back to the wagons.

She went to the second wagon this time. The plan was for her to get the second, fourth, and sixth wagons. Riverblossom would get the third, fifth, and seventh. Mara jumped into the wagon silently. She found more crates with some golden table-wear and more boxes filled with straw. For the most part, this convoy seemed to be transporting random fancy junk along with hay. The gold was likely to fetch a decent price when melted down. The silver too. She dug through the hay a bit and found a fist sized rock. It wasn’t shiny or expensive looking, but at this point, she was irritated enough by all the hay that she took it out of spite.

She left the wagon in the same manner as before. She hoped Riverblossom was doing better than her. She dropped the stuff into another pile and went back for the last cart. She jumped into the fourth wagon and found something besides crates of hay. She found a cadre of soldiers staring out through a small flap in the front of the canvas cover. None of them had seen her, so she rolled out the way she came in. The soldiers were in the wrong place. That meant that the front wagon had some really good loot. It also meant that the third wagon probably had more soldiers in it.

The convoy being more protected than expected meant that they would have to be more cautious. It also meant better loot though. Riverblossom would see the soldiers in the third cart and get the same idea as Mara, at least Mara hoped so. She moved quickly to the lead cart and climbed quietly through the side of the canvas. More boxes awaited her. These were nicer boxes than before. They were filled with gold coins. Mara quickly figured that the boxes had too much gold for her to carry any substantial amount with her. So she scanned the wagon for anything less valuable that might still be maneuverable.

She saw something bright white near the back. As she approached it, she noticed it glow and pulse. She felt as though the world around her shook as she moved toward it. It was another rock, like the one she nicked from the second cart. It didn’t shine, it was just a rock. So why had it glowed as she approached it? She lifted it from the box it was sitting in. It had been placed in a vessel that was shaped specifically for it. She held it up and looked at it from all angles before she stuffed it in her pocket.

The world shaking had stopped. She almost hadn’t noticed. She snapped back from her thoughts when she realized the shaking had been the horses stopping. The driver of the cart was walking around the left side of the cart, and the navigator was walking around the right side. They must have heard her or something. She slowly moved to the front of the wagon and waited. When they pulled the canvas up at the back, she rolled out through a gap in the bottom of the canvas at the front of the cart.

She moved into the shadows of the woods. She moved back from the road to a spot where she wouldn’t be seen and waited for the convoy to start moving again. Several minutes passed while she listened to the drivers talk to each other. The navigator from the second cart had indeed seen her. The woman said she swore something leapt into the front cart. After a few more minutes, they convinced her that she was just tired from driving all night. Apparently, the navigators switched places with the drivers so they never stopped moving to camp somewhere.

When the people loaded back up and started moving, Mara breathed a sigh of relief. She walked back to the spot she had dropped the gold and picked it up. She loaded a bottomless bag, a misnomer, with her loot from the two wagons. She walked back to the silver pile and found Riverblossom sitting there with her loot.

“How did you fair?” asked the wood elf.

“Quite nice considering all the crates of straw. I got some gold and silver along with two rocks that don’t look like much.”

Riverblossom smiled. “I also got two rocks that don’t look like much. One of them glowed at me.”

“Me too. Let me see the ones you found.” Mara pulled her rocks out and Riverblossom did the same. They placed them on the ground together and watched them. The rocks looked like rocks. None of them glowed or shined or anything. They both looked for a few long moments before giving up. “They may just be rocks. I don’t know.”

“Maybe we can get an enchanter to appraise them for magic,” suggested Riverblossom.

“Sounds good. What else did you get?”

Riverblossom jumped to her feet and shook her hands in front of her with an almost subdued _squee_. “I got a small bag of pocket beds!”

“Really? How many were in it?”

“Thirty!”

A bag of pocket beds was a great boon. They were the size of coins until you blew dirt on them. When a pocket bed was set on the ground and someone blew dirt on it, it would grow to a six by three foot bed on legs. The legs put the user a full foot off the ground. Pocket beds were rare and they weren’t cheap. A man could work his whole life and never see one. Twenty men could work their whole lives and not afford one.

“Thirty!? We could sleep on a different bed every night for a few fortnights. What else did you get?”

“Those and some gold table-wear. We need to go to a smelter and melt all this stuff down.”

With that, they packed up their ill-gotten belongings and walked back to the crossroad. They walked down the road Mara had gone down earlier and headed off to melt most of the table-wear. They decided to keep one golden fork, spoon, and knife a piece. They would be eating like royalty for the rest of their lives, as long as Mara didn’t let Riverblossom keep track of them.


	6. Thranduil

**Thranduil**

The difference between his life before and his life now was vast. Thranduil had been trapped inside a bubble for over a hundred-fifty years. Before he went in, he had been careful about being in daylight. He had developed tricks to protect himself and special ways of walking through shadows. He could walk through city streets with his hood off and never once touch sunlight.

His life as a vampire had been a long and arduous one before he discovered how to walk around cities easily. He lived off of dirty hobos at night and fled from place to place, trying to stay ahead of the authorities. As a high elf, it was his most humiliating moment. He spent decades slowly working out where it was safe to feed and what kinds of people he could feed from. That is, until he tried to drink from the wrong hobo.

A dirty looking robed man was sitting by himself in the middle of a dark alley. Thranduil could see he was drinking from a skein. The smell would have been easy enough to detect without his vampirically enhanced olfactory sense. It was wine of incredibly new vintage, maybe last week. The man either had awful taste in wine or couldn’t afford anything older.

The man coughed a bit and spit a glob of something onto the wall across the alley from where he sat. He fit every criteria Thranduil had for a target. He was drunk, so people would assume his death was related to the booze. He was old looking so everyone would think he led a long life and ignore looking too closely at the cause of death. He was sickly which made both of those ideas easier to accept. And finally, he was drinking alone in an alley, which likely meant that nobody loved him or cared about him.

Thranduil approached the man slowly but confidently. “Good sir, you seem to be in need of assistance. Would you like some help?”

The man croaked in a low voice before truly replying. “I’m fine, sonny.” His voice was much deeper than seemed likely from a drunk hobo. You expect gruff, but you don’t expect to hear the aural embodiment of an abyss. Thranduil wasn’t deterred though.

“There is a clinic right down the street. You sound sick. I can help you get there if you want. I could also take you back to my place if you think a place to crash would be helpful.”

The hobo chuckled. “This alley is warm enough and I don’t think the clinic is the place for me. Thanks anyway.”

Thranduil had been a bit perturbed. Normally homeless people ignored the offer of going to a clinic because they would cast spells to remove the buzz from a drunk person before helping them, but they almost always said yes to a place to sleep indoors. Thranduil didn’t have a place for them to sleep. He just used it as an excuse to drop their guard and have them stand up. It made biting them more comfortable for him. He didn’t like having to lean down or get down on his knees to drink. This guy had just almost guaranteed that he would have to lay down on top of a smelly hobo to drink.

“I appreciate the offer, but I’m happy here.”

“Suit yourself.” Thranduil stepped up against the wall and leapt at the man from his blind spot. A hood may help with the cold, but it has the distinct disadvantage of blocking one’s sight in the peripheral. Thranduil landed on the man and whipped the hood off before biting down at his neck. There wasn’t time though.

When he landed on the guy’s back, the glob of something the man had spit onto the opposite wall began to glow. More flared up instantly. It formed a circle with odd shapes in the middle and was the size of a person. As he bit down, time seemed to freeze, but only for him. People moved through the street as normal. The wind was still blowing. The hobo wasn’t sitting under his feet anymore. The man stood slowly and stretched. He turned to face his attacker.

“I had hoped you wouldn’t do that.” It was a dark elf. When he stood to his full height, he was comparable to Thranduil. “You have violated the basic laws of undead creatures living amongst the living. You are under arrest by authority of the Mages Council of Aerial Rock. How do you plead to the charges of more than a hundred murders?”

Thranduil felt his face unfreeze from time. “Guilty, I guess. Why even ask the question if you have evidence of my aggression?”

“I have to ask to see if you are going to stupidly lie to my face. Since you plead guilty, you have several options. I am your judge, jury, and executioner. So I have the power to sentence you to whatever I deem fair. First is what guilty vampires are supposed to get, death by sunlight. You have stood in sunlight before, yes?”

Thranduil winced as he nodded.

“I thought so. Would you like to hear your other options then?” He waited a moment and Thranduil nodded again. He continued. “Good. Option two is eternal imprisonment. It would likely drive you insane and end in death by sunlight. So it isn’t really a better option than number one. Option three is the first positive one. You can take on a quest to cure yourself of vampirism. It would take you to distant lands and you might not survive. You would also have a tracker spell placed on you to prevent you from escaping or straying from your path too far. How does that one sound?”

Thranduil thought for only a second before responding. “I like being a vampire. What else ya got?”

The man let out a quick breath of a laugh. “The last few options are my favorites. We made them just for people like you. First, you get the option of becoming a knight’s house steward. You would be allowed to stay a vampire, you would only work at night, and you could still drink human blood if your liege approved of the target. It does come with the disadvantage of being under someone’s direct full control. You would have to be at his beck and call for the rest of his family’s lineage. You would only be free once his last heir died. That sound like something you want?”

Thranduil weighed the last points carefully. After a minute, he decided that it wasn’t worth it. He might be trapped serving some incompetent fool or he might be under some kind of sexual deviant with a thing for being in control and a thing for vampire butts. “No. That’s a high risk venture. What’s left?”

“My favorite. You get this choice only because I can sense real magic potential in you. Come back to the mages academy in Aerial Rock. You will be free to study whatever specialty you wish until you graduate. After that, you are a free vampire again. You’ll be given lessons on who and what you can drink from as well as refining your palate to broaden your selection. Those are all of your options. Which one sounds best?”

Thranduil chose the academy after a while of thinking and staring at the no-longer-homeless man. He spent years there with his shitty roommate getting him in trouble all the time. They stayed roommates throughout their academy days and both graduated at the same time. They played harmless pranks that grew into nearly deadly pranks. Vampires don’t need sleep, so he just used the time to stay up studying when classes weren’t in session. He used this advantage to stay ahead of his competition after leaving school.

Thranduil had chosen to become a master in casting spells, picking violent and combative spells as his specialty. Defensive spells, trap spells, and offensive spells became how he made a living.

Being a vampire meant defending himself from the sun during the day. He kept his old tactics of keeping to shadows and mostly staying indoors around noon.

Graduating as a journeyman, he chose not to return for his master title. He jumped straight back into the world he hadn’t been a part of for decades of schooling and started working under another vampire as a local exterminator. They mostly worked at night so his job was only dangerous when he dealt with particularly big threats. Being a vampire didn’t get in the way and his boss taught him how to live more easily during the days.

*****

All that was gone now though. He had spent too long outside of danger. The bubble was too protective, so he had forgotten most of his training. He hadn’t cast spells at all during the previous sesquicentury. He would have to learn all of them again.

On the bright side, Isilude didn’t seem to remember any of his spells either. The two of them had agreed that taking on the task of finding their mutual student would be difficult without any of their magical prowess. The masters had been kind enough to impound all of their possessions during their imprisonment, so the two elves went to get anything the thought they might need for a long journey.

Thranduil had expected them to put some kind of spell around his home to keep out intruders. He was disappointed to find that, instead, they had simply hired some movers to drag all of his belongings to the academy and place them in a storage room. “At least it wasn’t damp or roach infested,” he thought to himself. He sorted through everything in a few hours and organized it in a way that, to an outsider, would appear to still be a huge mess.

Once organizing was done, he gathered some enchanted items together to use in lieu of spells. He also took a bottomless bag and stuffed it with his most useful books. He was going to learn all of his magic again as quickly as possible on the road.

He walked out of the storage room and saw Isilude walking out of his own down the hall. “Are you ready, Thranduil?”

“I am, Isilude. Do we have transportation?”

“The masters are providing us with horses, but they said we can only take one each, no pack animals. Did you pack light?” He looked at Thranduil and nodded. “You did. Good.”

“Shall we investigate the room first?” Without waiting for an answer, Thranduil walked off toward the stairs that led above ground. He heard footsteps behind him and gave a self-satisfied grin. They may not be enemies anymore for the moment, but their trip was going to be the most passive aggressive road trip any two high elves had ever taken together.

They reached Siland’s room and realized that it would be practically impossible for them to gain any new information from the scene. Master wizards had studied the pristine room and found nothing but his notes and books. Any information about his whereabouts were going to be nearly impossible to glean from such sparse information.

“I know where he went.” Isilude hadn’t said a word on the walk over, but he said this almost as soon as he walked through the door.

“What? How the fuck could you possibly figure it out that fast when the masters couldn’t?”

“Look at his bed.”

Thranduil turned away from the desk and paperwork to see a glowing aura floating above Siland’s bed. He walked to where Isilude was standing. He could now see that the aura, which had been paper-thin from the perspective of the desk, was actually a glowing note with their names at the top. In massive glowing letters, it read…

 

_Isilude and Thranduil,_

_I have left this note with an enchantment so that only the two of you can see it. You will likely be freed soon after they realize I have gone. I am sorry it took me so long to get this far in my studies and that I won’t be graduating. If they don’t free you when I leave, and you find this note years or more afterwards, I am deeply sorry for that as well. I wish I could have said something to you before I left, but you might have tried to stop me or, worse than that, tell on me. The masters mustn’t find out where I have gone until I have completed my experiments. If you find this note soon after my disappearance, please come join me on the northernmost tip of the continent. I have been building a lab on the cape and I could use the expertise of two powerful mages._

_Your Student,_

_Siland Ribbontrop_

 

Thranduil looked over the note a few times. He leaned back a bit and scratched his chin. There was a continent map on the wall across the room. He walked over and examined the north most point. There was a cape as stated in the note. It was rather narrow as well, so it would be impossible to miss a lab if one was there.

“We know where he is now. But that’s gonna take us weeks to get there.” Thranduil was still examining the map.

“We best get going then,” Isilude said as he walked out the door without waiting to see if Thranduil followed. At that moment, Thranduil accepted his previous thought as absolute truth. This would definitely be the most passive aggressive road trip ever.

*****

After packing up and leaving the academy with a real road map, it was dark enough that Thranduil didn’t need any kind of cover spell. The sheer amount of open road on the trip would be bad enough, but a large portion of the first few days was going to mean travelling through plains.

He was already studying his books on shadow spells. He would need to figure out some basics on how to draw mana from the world before he could cast any of them, but he would be damned if that meant starting with useless prestidigitation. He could see that after they put the horses on a long straightaway, Isilude was also studying.

He thought it would be overly annoying to travel with the person he disliked more than any other in the world, but it might turn out to be the most peaceful journey ever. They would spend most of the time studying to catch back up to their former glory. When they camped so that Isilude could sleep, he could get ahead of his rival and be stronger for it.

After a long time of sitting in silence, Thranduil saw a glow on the horizon to his right. They had left during the evening so that there would be plenty of time to get across some of the plains before the sun came up. He knew it would be a few days before they reached any kind of tree density. The plains would offer few places to shade himself.

“Looks like sunrise in about an hour.” Isilude was looking to the east as well. “Have you figured out any way to cover yourself? At least a part of your face is gonna have sunlight hitting it for most of the day.”

Isilude was right. They were travelling from the far south side of the continent. The continent itself was on the far south side of the planet. The sun would be rising in the northern part of the sky for the entire trip, that being the direction they were travelling meant that he would always be looking at the sun during the day.

“I still have some time. Don’t think you will rid yourself of me this early into the trip.”

“I wouldn’t want to rid myself of you at all. I will need an offensive travelling companion to stay alive when we hit the woods far north in a few weeks.” He pulled a mesh cloth from one of his saddle bags and tossed it to Thranduil. He caught it and stretched it out.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a hood I designed years ago. I have a few of them. I thought it would suck if you ever escalated our little prank war to the point of turning me, so I made a hood, gloves, and socks that offer nearly full protection from the sun while never limiting mobility or dexterity.”

Thranduil was a bit shocked. Not only that Isilude would actually invent something like this, but that he would willingly give a set to his most impressive rival. “Thank you,” he said with a hint of suspicion in his voice. “If this thing doesn’t work and I get burned, I will bite you.”

“Noted, fuck face. I tested it with your boss at that exterminator place you worked at. He owns a closet full of ‘em.”

More revelations Thranduil hadn’t expected. “You actually talked him into testing these for you?”

“He was happy to. I became good friends with him years ago. I once told him that it would suck to deal with daylight if I ever became photophobic. He agreed and told me that there were certain tricks vampires used to avoid sunlight. One tip he gave me was that certain materials blocked the sunlight just enough to make it kind of itchy, but not burning or painful. So I experimented with thicknesses and showed him some prototypes. He got burned a few times, but I eventually figured out a mesh so thin that seeing through it was a piece of cake and it wouldn’t burn his skin.”

The glow of the sun was getting brighter over the horizon. “I would suggest you go ahead and put it on now. The sun may not be up for a bit, but you will want to get used to it before its necessary. Garreth told me that the itchiness could take some getting used to.”

“You were on a first name basis with him?” Thranduil’s voice became muffled momentarily as he slid the hood over his head. When it was in place though, his voice cleared up to normal.

“Yeah. We talked about you sometimes. He convinced me to do some of the better pranks I pulled on you. But don’t get mad at him. He also convinced me that a few of my funnier ideas were close to being over the line.”

Thranduil thought back to some of the less annoying things Isilude had done to him and smiled. If his boss had told him to do those, then he could see them as funny instead of cruel. One advantage he could see to wearing the hood was the blankness of his face. Isilude wouldn’t be able to see him smile or glower if he wasn’t staring too hard.

They continued in silent study after that. The sunrise didn’t bother Thranduil pretty much at all. The last 150 years inside a bubble meant that he dealt with a mild itchiness daily. The mask was better protection than his healing bubble. The trip might devolve into them being passive aggressive, but at least it was starting off on the right foot.


	7. Eaes'sid

**Eaes’sid**

The dragonborn woke with a start to find his new dwarf companions standing over him. They looked confused and a bit concerned. He thought back to why they might be concerned for him.

He hadn’t fallen off of his horse. He didn’t even have a horse. They had been travelling by foot since they left town. He hadn’t been shot or stabbed because he would have felt the wound. Unless he was in shock! His thoughts raced to find memories of a recent battle. All he could remember though was falling asleep at the edge of the woods outside of Shoal Side.

They set up camp the night after leaving and he took first watch. After a few hours of nothing eventful, he woke Fulgrim for second watch. He fell asleep as quickly and easily as always. He had learned, as so many rogues had, that falling asleep was crucial for functioning properly during an operation. He began to think about whether he had been bitten by something as he slept when Falagan spoke.

“Are you okay, dude? You sounded like you were gargling stones with the volume turned to eleven.”

That’s when he realized that he must have been roaring in his sleep. They were concerned that he might be dying because he was doing the equivalent of a human talking in their sleep. He sat up slowly and chuckled bit. “I thought something was really wrong with me when I saw your faces.” They looked a bit more concerned at that. Eaes’sid decided to explain.

“Some people talk in their sleep. You may have done it before and never knew. The difference is that when we dragonborn do it, we do it in the ancient tongue of our dragon ancestors. We don’t speak our native language of Draconic or the languages we’ve grown accustomed to. We bellow in the tones of Ancient Dragon.”

Fulgrim was the first to look relieved. Then he look a bit concerned again. “If you’ve done that randomly throughout your journeys, haven’t you had to deal with creatures and bandits attacking you while you sleep?”

“Not for the most part. Would you run towards the sound of a screaming dragon if you didn’t have to? I had to deal with a roving band of dragon slayers once, but they quickly realized that they hadn’t found a true dragon and went away dejected. To tell the truth, I’m surprised you woke me instead of hiding.”

Falagan looked a bit hurt. “We aren’t cowards, you know. We thought our new friend might be in danger if he stayed sleeping, so we woke you.”

“I didn’t mean any offense by it. I just mean that most parties I have travelled with tend to hide from me when it happens the first time. I’m sorry I forgot to mention it.”

Eaes’sid pulled himself up to sit on the rock that had been his pillow. He rubbed his eyes and sighed. He looked to the sky and saw light on the horizon to the east. “Looks like it’s about time to leave anyway.”

Falagan didn’t need to take watch that night because they were doing four hour rotations and night to night rotations. They had decided that Fulgrim and Eaes’sid would take the first night, then Eaes’sid and Falagan would take night two, and so on. It wasn’t ideal, but it did mean that one person would always be well rested on their journey.

Eaes’sid stood up and brushed off his trousers. “Are we gonna eat something for breakfast, or move on and wait until lunch?”

“I think breakfast is a good idea on the first morning of the trip. We won’t always get the chance.” Fulgrim was already unpacking the cooking gear and setting it up. Eaes’sid made a mental note to always mention food to Fulgrim first. Falagan didn’t seem to be as quick to say yes to breakfast; he seemed to want to hurry up. Fulgrim on the other hand seemed to jump at the chance to eat something. That meant that if he got a little too hungry, Eaes’sid could mention food to Fulgrim and he could just let the dwarf’s self-control fall away and they would have a meal.

It took Fulgrim only a few minutes to put together a meal. Eaes’sid knew that he had been a master crafter, but he hadn’t known that the title included food as well. The man was a great cook. More helpful information to store away. He didn’t know what Falagan’s food would taste like, but it almost certainly wasn’t as saintly as his brother’s.

As they ate breakfast, the sun rose high enough that it was visible on the edge of the sky. When they finished eating, Fulgrim packed all of the utensils into his bag and they cleaned up their campsite.

They had decided that their journey would be to find and kill the mad old wizard. They debated for a while in Falagan’s house about whether going after such a powerful enemy even made sense, but in the end they concluded that it was the only way to rid themselves of the constant threat. There would be other assassination attempts if they didn’t go after him, so that was their ultimate goal. They had also decided that the only way to truly guarantee that they could accomplish this goal was to recruit some soldiers to help.

Their first true destination was going to be the town of Huntington. It was on the northern part of the continent and it was closer to the madman’s rendezvous point than almost any other town. The advantage there was that it was larger than any closer towns and it had a decent reputation for hiring sell-swords for any cause. If a person looked different than you and you didn’t like that, you could get a band of gung-ho crossbowmen to hunt them down and fill them with bolts for a few bucks and a few beers.

The journey would take a long while because they were starting from the south west side of the continent. It would be weeks if they had horses, but it would take them much longer without. Eaes’sid had hoped that the first town they stopped at would have a stable and some cheap pack animals. Horses and mules were essential in his mind to the haste, and very success, of the mission.

After a few hours on the road, they reached the first fork. If they went north, they would be heading toward their goal sooner, but the closest town that way was pretty far off which meant walking for days before getting any mounts. If they went east though, the closest town was about two day’s walk away and they could sleep in beds before buying horses in the morning. The road also went south, but it wouldn’t be helpful to go that way. The closest town was as far away as the northern one and it was too small to have a good stable.

Neither route would save them time. They would be walking out of their way to get the horses, so they would be making up time after getting them. But it would mean less walking in the end, which made Eaes’sid’s choice for him.

He hated walking long distance. He had a horse for his trip to Shoal Side, but it belonged to the madman, so it ran off as soon as he hopped off to complete his task. He had asked the wizard why he couldn’t keep the horse for the ride back; he told Eaes’sid that he wanted no liability in the act. He might be caught and the horse could be traced back to the mage.

“We should go east and get horses first, then we can travel back here and head north.”

Falagan pondered the sentence for a minute, then nodded his agreement. “I think we could push the horses a bit to save an hour or two.”

The rest of that day was uneventful. They passed a traveler on the road heading west. He greeted them curtly and continued his brisk ride. He had been in full armor and seemed rather miffed.

After dark, they found a huge, clear place to set up camp on the roadside. The spot had obviously been used before, and pretty often at that.

The paranoia that went hand-in-hand with being a rogue meant that Eaes’sid felt a little over-exposed in a place that had obviously been used often for travelers. It meant that bandits knew right where to look to catch people unawares. He knew that Falagan must have been feeling it as well. You don’t get to be where he was without understanding some basic tactics like that.

“Is this really where we want to camp?” The question, which would have made sense from either rogue, seemed to be hammered home more heavily because Fulgrim was the one asking it.

“Not really,” answered Falagan. “This place isn’t good for such a small band as ours. Maybe if we had five people on watch at a time and a small army for backup.”

Eaes’sid nodded. “I agree, but we need to set up camp soon. Let us look for a spot near here.”

They all assented and began searching for a better campsite off in the woods a bit. Eaes’sid had been searching for a few minutes before he realized why that one location was so worn down and over used. There were sheer cliffs not forty feet from the road in most places. The trees hid it well. As the foliage had grown thicker, Eaes’sid had assumed that the forest was getting bigger.

The cliffs made it impossible to camp anywhere except on that site. On the bright side, though, no one could sneak up on them in the night. The road was the only way to easily travel here.

He walked back to the over-worn site and waited for the dwarves to come to the same conclusion. A few minutes passed before they showed back up.

“I figured out why this place is so worn down,” Fulgrim said with sarcasm.

“I think we all came to the same conclusion, brother.”

“You would think we would have visited this place at some point during our past. I would remember a place this close to home where the only rest site is right on the road. So… do we just set up camp here?”

“We don’t much of a choice, Fulgrim. Falagan, I’ll set up the fire. You’re first watch tonight, so rest a bit first.”

A few hours passed when, for the second night in a row, Eaes’sid was shaken awake by one of the dwarves. This time, though, the look on Fulgrim’s face was not concern for him. He wasn’t looking at Eaes’sid at all, in fact. Eaes’sid noticed that the fire was out and Falagan wasn’t visible from his vantage point.

“He’s stepped off the road into the trees,” whispered Fulgrim, answering his thought.

“What’s going on?” They were whispering, so Eaes’sid had already worked it out. It was simple, but by pure reaction, he asked anyway.

“He heard some voices on the road. He woke me up and I heard them too. They aren’t trying to be quiet, so it isn’t likely that they’re going to stop here. He thought it would be safer to lay low until they passed by.”

Eaes’sid sat up quietly and they moved behind some rocks on the opposite side of the campsite from the road. If they needed to ambush the travelers, they could. If not, they could simply walk back into camp and share the site for the evening.

A few minutes passed before the light of a torch appeared on the road. The voices were loud, so it was obvious that they weren’t trying to hide themselves. Two men and two women were riding horses slowly up the road. They sounded sober by the tones of their voices. Clear speech, smooth voices, and large vocabulary. A few more minutes passed before they reached the campsite. They slowed down slightly and examined it. They seemed to have no problem seeing the site, even though it was fairly dark out and adjusting your eyes is difficult in torchlight.

They hadn’t stopped riding by, however. They simply looked at the campsite as they passed by slowly. The woman in the rear was looking in the woods, up and down the road, and back to the campsite. When they finally passed after a minute or so, they began talking again. Their voices grew slowly quieter as they moved away from Eaes’sid and the dwarves.

Another few minutes went by before Eaes’sid and Fulgrim stood up and walked back to their belongings. They didn’t see Falagan, but he was probably just following that party in the woods a bit before he could be sure they had really left.

Eaes’sid reached his gear and placed his small buckler down on his pack where he’d picked it up before. He almost turned all the way back around when an ear-splitting screech came from behind him. He tried to pull his short sword and a dagger from his hip, but he was hit hard before his hands reached either of their scabbards.

The nearly glowing eyes of the creature atop his now prone body were visible even in the darkness. Eaes’sid had never met a being with such eyes. His low light vision was decent, but those eyes would be able to see with perfect clarity in total darkness. The eyes flicked to the side of his head.

“Not skin.”

“Nope,” Eaes’sid bellowed as he kicked the thing with all of the strength he could. He jumped to his feet, then ducked a swipe at his face from another assailant. He rolled toward his pack and grabbed his steel buckler. He brought it straight up above his head just in time to stop an attempted swipe at his skull. The blow glanced off his shield.

He pulled his short sword from its scabbard and squared up with the two attackers. The low light gave him no trouble. He could now easily see that these two creatures were two of the people riding their horses from before. All four of their eyes were nearly glowing.

Slowly, they tried to circle him left and right to try flanking him, but he lunged quickly to the left side of the left attacker and blocked the attack from the right attacker. His strategy worked and the two creatures were now standing closer together. He repeated his tactic once more, which placed both of his opponents with their backs to a tall formation of rocks.

With them cornered, he faked his left attack again before lunging directly at his right attacker. He had never met a humanoid opponent that would fall for such a feint, but she did. He stuck his short sword through her face as he bashed her chest downward with the shield. The effect was the sword splitting her head in twain. A fountain of blood just barely missed his face.

The left opponent had leapt to his left again, but this time a person was standing in the way. The fountain of blood that had missed Eaes’sid showered the man in thick goo. He slipped on the now slick ground and fell onto his back. Eaes’sid didn’t waste a single moment. He plunged his dagger down into the man’s heart. The steel dagger got stuck when he tried to pull it out.

He decided to leave it there and see if the others needed help. Fulgrim had crushed the head of one attacker and was about to lop off the other’s. He overextended his reach and the woman who was still standing rushed inside his attack. She grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off the ground.

She couldn’t have been more than a few inches taller than Fulgrim, and her size should have meant that she couldn’t lift a man of his height and weight. Eaes’sid saw the danger and began his charge at her. He had taken only a few steps before he tripped on something and got dragged backwards.

The man with the dagger in his chest was still fighting. The fall to the ground had knocked some wind out of Eaes’sid, so he didn’t have enough strength left to kick the guy off of him yet. The man pulled back his left fist to try punching Eaes’sid in the face. He closed his eyes and angled his face so the punch might just glance off.

It took a second for him to realize the punch wasn’t coming. He opened his eyes to see no one sitting there. The man was no longer atop his chest. He had been replaced by a pile of ash.

“You’re welcome,” came an unfamiliar voice from behind him.

He jumped to his feet and saw what looked like a cat person standing on a rock formation. He held a small crossbow in one hand and a wooden bolt in the other. He reloaded the weapon and slid down the rock. “Were there only the four of them?”

Eaes’sid’s tactical mind kicked in quickly enough to avoid the inevitable ‘Who are you?’ and ‘What was that thing?’ “Yes. We only saw four on the road anyway. There may have been more in the woods.”

“There was one.” This time the voice was familiar. Falagan walked up to the two of them and spoke. “I watched them carefully. When they attacked, the yell was a call to arms. They summoned one more person from the darkness of the forest. I got him before he made it to the clearing.”

“Is Fulgrim alright? I saw that woman pick him up off his feet.”

“Your friend is fine.” Another unfamiliar figure stepped over to the group. She was a wood elf. And she was accompanied by Fulgrim. “I was able to stop her before she could cause any permanent damage.”

Eaes’sid was relieved. Now, he decided, was time to ask his questions. “Wh…”

“Who are you two?” Fulgrim interrupted.

“I am Caelia.” Her voiced conveyed a silent power buried somewhere inside her.

“And I am Rizra,” said the cat-man. “I’m a Level 7 in the Rogue’s Guild. I can see that you two are also members. Would you be willing to work together for the evening? We’re going to get supplies in the next town because we’re almost out. We could share watches tonight and be better rested in the morning.”

“A fellow rogue would of course be welcome company.” Falagan bowed as he said this.

“Now that we know who you are,” said Eaes’sid, “Would someone kindly tell me who those assholes were?”

“Vampires.” Rizra and Fulgrim spoke together. Rizra bowed a bit and allowed Fulgrim to continue. “The eyes are a dead giveaway. They have cat eyes.” Fulgrim looked a bit embarrassed as he caught himself. He looked over at Rizra. “No offense, man.”

“None taken. I’m pretty used to it.”

“Vampires tend to be pretty sneaky and incredibly strong. That’s why the woman could lift me so easily.”

“They are usually pretty smart too,” continued Falagan. “They should have been much tougher to fight.”

“Those were young vampires,” Caelia chimed in. “I could feel that they had been turned only recently. I fear this is merely indicative of something that has been going on for a long while now. I have sensed a great sickness through the forest. Nature itself seems to be growing ill. We can talk about it further once we set up a suitable camp.”

*****

A few minutes later, the group had the campsite rebuilt. Eaes’sid thought about what Caelia had claimed for a moment. “I have noticed that the plant life on our journey has been dourer than I’m used to. Do you have any idea of what’s causing it?”

Rizra and the others turned to look at her. Caelia didn’t answer for a moment; she seemed to be collecting her thoughts. “The source is getting stronger as I head north. I grow more concerned as the trip goes on. Once, I was able to walk through the forests, the plains, or even the deserts of this land without worry from the animals I considered my friends, but now I need a bit of help to protect me from those who used to watch over me. That’s how I found myself in Rizra’s company, in fact. The further north I go, the more aggressive the animals, and even the plants, become.”

“I have never had to fight so many angry deer in my life,” said Rizra. “I had no problems in the southern woods, but she has a point about how aggressive everything is up here. We aren’t even half way up the continent yet, but nothing seems to have any chill,” he grumbled.

The party sat silently for a moment. “Dinner, anyone?” asked Fulgrim. Everyone slowly stirred themselves toward the kettle. Fulgrim had made stew from some of the plant life lying around. They all sat down and ate while they figured out the watches for the night and discussed the finer details of their journeys going forth.

“Once we get some horses, we’re going back to the fork and turning north. We won’t make the journey as quickly as we need to without transportation.” Falagan was almost easy to understand, considering his face was full of his brother’s cooking.

“We are stopping in this town for supplies, then doing the same. Perhaps we could accompany you?” Caelia asked the question to both Eaes’sid and Rizra at the same time. She seemed to be comfortable enough with travelling in a larger group, but also seemed to think Rizra wouldn’t necessarily like it.

“I don’t see a problem with it. These two are fellow guild mates and that one cooks better than most I’ve travelled with. Do any of you object to some extra company?”

Eaes’sid looked over at the brothers. They stared back at him and, after a moment, shrugged in unison.

“Wonderful.” Caelia looked happy, but her voice didn’t seem to be able to express excess emotions. She said it with the voice of someone who is resigned to a task with no other choice.

After dinner came sleep. Eaes’sid found no trouble getting to sleep again. When he woke up this time, it was morning. The others were packing and Fulgrim had made a small breakfast for everyone. They all moved around quietly, preparing to leave.

Eaes’sid joined them. He packed, ate, and stood to leave once everyone was ready.


	8. Tyrant

**Tyrant**

A man with a deep flair for the dramatic, Tyrant Montague had an extreme desire to defend his honor. He saw his family’s honor as an extension of his own. So it was no surprise that he felt hurt and betrayed when his cousin decided to work for some guy no one in the family had ever met. It was even more of a betrayal when he decided to steal family secrets and give them to this guy.

Stendran Montague had always been a bit of a loner in the family, and while Tyrant might have ignored this kind of attitude in favor of his family loyalty, Stendran had decided to run off with sensitive information.

Tyrant had tracked his cousin to a facility in the south part of the middle kingdoms. The facility had been full of traps and guards. It even had animals that had been well taken care of. Tyrant had forced his way through the traitor’s minions only to find that he had been in the wrong place. Stendran had nothing to do with the building. The Rogues Guild had been hired to fake raid the fortress and had left a card to prove it. He knew how the guild worked most of the time. He had committed a dishonorable act of great caliber.

Tyrant had left the facility in a fury. It was the only way to hide his shame for the moment. He wasn’t a stupid man. He knew what had occurred and knew what mistake he’d made. Stendran had obviously known he would be pursued. He must have made a false track for his cousin to follow. It was obvious that with Tyrant’s profound skill for tracking people that Stendran had help in setting him down the wrong trail.

Tyrant’s mistake was hubris. He knew his own talents compared to Stendran’s. He knew that if they were placed on equal ground, he would have no chance of losing to the lesser Montague. He had waltzed into the building assuming his superiority and killed men who were just doing their jobs. The shame hit him when he reached a mile or so outside the fortress.

Tyrant fell to his knees. He would have merely slumped over on his horse, but he had decided that he didn’t deserve to ride. His horse was loyal enough to follow him with no need to be guided by the reins. Tyrant sat in the cold for about an hour considering how best to return to his family with any honor.

His grandparents would welcome him back regardless. They had long ago decided that family loyalty was important, but that honor was only useful in certain situations, like combat and diplomacy. His father was the one who instilled the deep sense in him. He would consider Tyrant’s failure a dark mark on the family. He would surely attempt to create a balance by doing something so grandiose that he would certainly die in the attempt.

That’s what snapped Tyrant from his slump. The idea that his father’s very life hung in the balance was enough for him to stand and brush himself off. He may not know where his cousin went, but he would damn well figure it out somehow.

*****

About two weeks passed with relative haste for Tyrant. He went to the Rogues Guild and spoke to them about the situation. They told him that he had just missed the agent in charge of the job, but they wouldn’t give him the information on who it had been.

After that, Tyrant rode at a full pace to every habitable place within a hundred miles. He only rested to give his horse respite. He spent days looking for clues as to the true whereabouts of his kin, until finally he had some luck.

Tyrant had ridden north and reached a town just inside the thick forest that covered that part of the continent. He was sitting down in a tavern waiting for his first real meal after a few days on the road.

Conversation was never his strong suit. Being raised in a fortified town with a castle at every corner of the city walls, he was taught to speak in the old ways. He was only now learning how to speak like common people.

So, when his waiter had asked for his order, he said, “The Order of Montague. Didst thou miss mine sigil?”

“No, sugar. Not, ‘To what Order do you belong?’ I asked, ‘What’s your order?’ As in what you want to eat.”

He felt like a real moron for a second. He was lucky the place was crowded and no one could overhear what she said. “I am terribly sorry.” He carefully chose his words to be less stuffy sounding. “I will have anything made from bovine or ovine.” His words worked, and didn’t. Her expression was confused for a split second before reforming into a laugh that was definitely audible to the few nearby tables.

Tyrant was about to stand and retreat in embarrassment, when the slight quieting of the other diners caused by his waitress’s laughter allowed him to hear a conversation about a rich guy stopping in the local Hunter Lodge for a hunting trip. He forgot his slight humiliation and finished his order with confidence.

Stendran was a known hunting enthusiast. He was terrible at it, but he liked killing things and knew that a murder charge was something his family wouldn’t protect him from. It was a possible clue and the best one he had gotten all fortnight.

After eating, he made his way to the local lodge. Just inside the front door was a large room filled with tables and chairs. There were a few men scattered around the room drinking. They were obviously regulars.

There was a man standing behind a counter that seemed to serve as both front desk and bar near the back of the room. Tyrant made his way to the bar, weaving between tables as he went. He got some glares and sensed his appearance was not wholly liked by the denizens. When he reached the bar, Tyrant asked the man if he had met someone by the name of Stendran and he described him to the man.

The bartender/secretary said that a man matching his cousin’s description had come in about a week before and demanded their best hunters for a trip for big game in the woods.

“They haven’t come back yet, but most of those rich pricks can’t shoot shit and refuse to come back until they do.”

That sounded like Stendran. He had found the traitor. “To whence location did they depart?”

The man looked like he might now be regretting the rich prick line. He showed Tyrant a map of the woods and pointed to the most likely trail the party would have taken.

“Dost thou…” He really needed to try harder. “Kind sir, do you happen to be in possession of a copy of this map that I may take?”

The guy was obviously regretting his former statement. Tyrant’s correction in speech seemed to have made the man feel threatened more than anything else.

“I do have copies. We sell them.”

“I require one. How much do you charge for a single copy?”

“They’re five gold coins apiece.”

Tyrant knew this was highway robbery. Five gold coins to him was a pittance, but to these people it was closer to a few day’s work. He weighed his options at that moment. He wasn’t in the mood to fight about something as trivial as a few coins, but his honor had already been besmirched enough for a while. He thought of it as a possible penance for his atrocious acts weeks prior.

He then thought about how some people dressed in nice armor such as his because they had saved for years or because they served someone well, and how men such as the bartender used words as weapons when steel wasn’t viable. The entire situation was squaring up to be a fight, Tyrant just had to decide what kind. These men needed to understand that judging someone’s purse by their clothing was a dangerous venture.

In a movement almost unseen, Tyrant used the flat of his sword to knock over the contents of several tables behind him. He placed himself into a mass defense stance. It made sense that, with the lodge having regulars, they would attack someone if the lodge deemed it necessary. Several stood up and drew well maintained blades. Several more chugged what remained of their beers and headed quickly for the door. Some people know a trained knight when they see one, and few want to mess with them.

The ones not moving to the door quickly surrounded him in the dumbest possible way. There wasn’t enough room to maneuver with the tables and chairs in the way. Tyrant had already decided what he would do next and how the battle would play out. These men knew how to track and hunt prey, but he was a closer analog for predator than prey.

One of the fools dove at him and the idiots standing around did exactly as he thought they would. They stood there and watched. Bars are filled with two kinds of idiocy, too much pride and too much dishonor. The prideful people always attacked first in a bar fight. The dishonorable would try to grab a man and hold him while the others did all the work. The mix of these two groups, though, meant that the first attackers would do so alone. They couldn’t miss the chance to end the conflict on their own and brag later.

Fool one’s dive ended quickly with a severed head. Tyrant wasn’t a man for half measures. The dishonorable men changed their tactics to grabbing heavy objects to throw. That’s when fool two decided it was his chance. He had been behind Tyrant and charged silently. Tyrant parried and cut the man’s Achilles tendons in one wide arc. The man fell, screaming.

The bartender had gone for a ranged approach and grabbed a crossbow from behind the bar. He fired and the bolt met a tabletop. Tyrant had seen the attack coming and waited to flip the table until the last second. As the table flipped quickly, it caught the arrow and Tyrant leapt over it once it was flat. With a mailed hand, he knocked the crossbow down into the bar. It snapped in half.

It was time for more than one fool at a time to attack him. He sprang over the bar and put his back to the wall with the bartender’s head in a lock. He gripped his sword in reverse and put the point on the man’s unprotected belly. “He dies if one of you moves.” His speech seemed to be improving. Fool three and four both stopped dead. “I just wanted fair treatment. Next time, maybe you’ll grant it freely. I will be taking the map for free now.”

Fool five spoke up. “Not a chance.” He took one step and Tyrant shrugged as he gutted the barman. He yanked his sword free and grabbed a dagger from one of the shelves under the bar. He threw it into the man’s face. Tyrant was a skilled warrior and incredibly strong, but both the fact that he lacked the dexterity of a rogue or other ranged fighter and the fact that the mail he wore prevented his movements from being swift meant that the throw hit the man dead in the nose, but landed hilt first. An explosion of blood erupted from the man’s snout. He fell to the ground holding his shattered face.

The remaining fools stopped being foolish and retreated from the building. Tyrant moved over to the man holding his face. “I need that map. Where is it?” The man pointed to an alcove off to the side of the large room. There was a woman standing behind a small desk. She was already holding a handful of the maps rolled into scrolls. She thrust them toward Tyrant, shakily.

He breathed out a sigh. Sheathing his sword, he walked over to the woman and took two copies of the map. He walked back to the bar and drew the trail that the man had shown him earlier. As he started to leave, a town guard patrol showed up, weapons ready for a fight. Tyrant sighed again.

*****

A few hours passed before the guards let him go. It was technically self-defense because fool one attacked first. The bartender hadn’t told him to leave, nor had anyone warned him that he would be liable for anything that happened. He knew enough about brawls to be careful during the process.

He left the barracks with a few new friends in a region he didn’t know very well. It was a useful tactic he’d picked up through years of short ventures outside the fortress he was raised.

He climbed on his horse and rode swiftly from town heading north. He rode for a few hours before he reached the entrance to the trail shown on the map. He decided that his best course of action was to wait for them to return. He would set a trap for the men and spring it when he saw his cousin.

He set up camp and planned out his trap. It was nearly dark out so he knew they would camp tonight. Even if they were on their way out of the forest, they wouldn’t emerge until the next morning at the earliest. He ate and set up his defenses for the evening before going to sleep.

He awoke early just in case the hunters were anxious to leave and forced Stendran to wake up earlier than he liked. He had a quick breakfast of cold jerky, fed his horse, and then prepared himself for the possible approach of hunters.

He quickly discovered that vengeance wasn’t enough to keep his mind active in the deafening quiet. Then he realized just how deafeningly quiet it was. He had been taught about listening to nature when tracking people. Birds could be disturbed by people easily and so could other wildlife. He learned to listen to what creatures were doing so that he could determine if a person had come through an area recently.

This forest had nothing but wind. The wind was sparse, but there weren’t even bugs communicating. The thought disturbed Tyrant. Had his family’s secrets included a spell to destroy nature on such a scale? Even if it had, was Stendran even powerful enough with magic to use such a spell?

His thoughts ran wildly through his head. He was almost too distracted when he heard a rustling deep in the woods. He snapped back to attention, but heard nothing else for a moment. He closed his eyes to concentrate on hearing.

His eyes snapped open in a mix of fear and confusion. He could swear he heard a bear roaring quietly. He had never heard of a bear trying to be stealthy. It seemed pretty obvious why. Either bears were masters of stealth and no one had ever seen or heard of the stealthy ones, or they were all as terrible as this one at it. It was certainly a bear. He was sure of it. He jumped into a combat stance and prepared to fight a bear, or perhaps an army of bears, capable of minor stealth capabilities. Then he heard a strange noise that sounded like a whoosh of air and a small pop. Now thoroughly confused, he decided it best to call out.

“Is someone there? I’m waiting for someone and don’t wish any trouble.” His speech was matching common speech more and more. He heard no response for a few minutes. No more rustling could be heard in the trees either. After what felt like an eternity in a fighting stance, another popping noise occurred and what looked like a crow hopped out of the woods.

It cocked its head to one side and back to the other, then hopped closer. It had a small twig in its mouth. When it was within a few yards of Tyrant, the bird set the twig down slowly and hopped away from it. As it backed away, Tyrant moved over to the twig cautiously. When he got a bit closer, he realized it was a dead olive branch. He stared for a moment before laughing out loud. He realized that his laugh might seem a bit pompous and decided to work on that as well.

He stopped laughing and removed his helmet. “I accept your offer, though I am more accustomed to doves offering peace than ravens.”

The crow hopped slowly back into the woods out of sight and a small mousey woman appeared a few yards down the tree line from where it had entered. She seemed to be putting away a set of hand crossbows. “I am glad to see you accept peace. Would you be so inclined to continue said peace knowing that we have several human bodies wrapped up in ropes?”

Tyrant’s face became harder. He thought carefully for a moment. “What were their crimes?”

A naked woman stepped out of the trees where the crow had entered. “They were going to kill my animal friends and possibly me. They knocked me out and tied me up in the woods.”

Tyrant jumped back to reality. These bodies could be those of the hunters he searched for. “Tell me…” He started too excitedly and seemed to have startled the two women. “I’m sorry, but I must know quickly. Did these men have a rich benefactor with them?”

The two women looked at each other and seemed to have a mental conversation about whether telling him was a good idea.

“Please, I must know. I am hunting my cousin. He was said to have come this way with a hunting party.”

The woman with the bows nodded slightly. “A man of that description was among them. Help us bring the bodies to the road and you may identify the bodies, if you can.”

This was a major blow to Tyrant. His honor had been destroyed by his own mistake. If he couldn’t bring his cousin back to pay for his crimes, or kill him on his own, he wasn’t sure how he could start truly recovering.

He nodded his assent to help. He entered the woods and followed them a few yards in to find a stack of bodies and various items atop a wide wooden board. These woman had dragged four men and their equipment through the woods. He could tell by the path of torn grass and shrubbery that it was at least far from view that they had started. He decided to save his astonishment for later.

He lifted the board on one end and dragged it several yards by himself. He didn’t realize that helping them had meant they would actually help. He was used to people asking for help and then getting out of his way. They lifted the two corners on the other side of the board together and moved the pile out to road with relative ease.

They set down the bodies and gear and began unwrapping them. The naked woman grabbed some clothes from the pile and dressed herself.

“We decided that it would be best for my friends if these men looked like they had been robbed and killed on the road instead of killed in the woods. I feared hunters would show up and get vengeance if they thought a hidden band with some nefarious purpose was hiding in the woods.”

Tyrant conceded that the hunters he had met at the lodge seemed like a spiteful bunch if they thought they had been slighted. He started rolling the bodies out of their wrappings. The first body was a big guy. The next few were a bit smaller. He unwrapped each one as he came to them and then positioned them to look like they defended themselves from bandits, but lost.

He finally reached the last body while the women were tossing useless loot around to look like the men’s possessions had been ransacked. He unraveled the person and recognized his kin. He sat there for a moment and felt something unexpected--loss. He thought he had already accepted his cousin as being dead before he left the castle. Dishonor had meant disowning his cousin outright. He had loved Stendran as much as he loved anyone in his family, though.

He picked up his cousin’s head and placed the stiff body on his lap. For a few minutes, he wept. He only stopped when he realized that the women had finished their task and were staring at him. He wiped his eyes and sniffed. He picked up Stendran’s body as though carrying a child and carefully positioned him on the ground as though he was running from something when he was shot.

“So what now?” asked the bow-woman.

“I can’t go home yet.” Tyrant hung his head as he spoke. He walked over to a rock and sat down. “I can’t return until I have regained honor that I lost. I thought I would find it here, but alas I have not.”

“We have decided to travel together because, with these men dead, my friends are safe for now. And my new friend here says that something odd is happening to the forests. Since I’m going to help her, maybe you could help us.” The previously naked woman walked over closer to him and looked down at him. “Perhaps you could join us and defend us. We obviously don’t need much help considering what we’ve done, but if we get too out-numbered, we could use some.”

Tyrant looked up at her. She was smiling and offering a hand to him. Then he look over at the other woman. She nodded slightly as though giving him consent to accept. He grabbed the woman’s hand and stood, shaking it. “My name is Tyrant Montague. I am a knight from house Montague.”

“I’m Daliah Blackwood,” said the previously naked woman. “And this is Ahria.”


	9. Falagan

**Falagan**

The morning after the vampire attack, Falagan was awake last. He knew he could sleep in with a member of the Rogues Guild on watch. It may seem strange to outsiders, but being a member of the guild made you as trustworthy as any family member.

He stretched and sat up slowly to the decadent smell of his brother’s cooking. Fulgrim had always been the artist of the family, so it wasn’t a surprise when studying craftsmanship across the world included food preparation as well. People always balked at the thought of Fulgrim cooking the meals before they spent time with him.

Falagan stood and walked to the campfire. He grabbed a kabob skewer and ate it slowly to savor the taste. Everyone seemed to be doing the same. He enjoyed seeing the looks of joy on everyone’s faces. Somehow, regardless of his and his brother’s talents, the only one that he was envious of was the cooking part.

About twenty minutes after waking up, they broke down camp. They loaded up Caelia and Rizra’s horses and started off toward the next town. One uneventful day and one uneventful night later, and they arrived about noon. Falagan hadn’t always gotten along with horses, but he had to admit that they were infinitely better than walking for another few weeks straight.

They had more than enough money to buy the three horses they needed to accommodate himself, Eaes’sid, and Fulgrim. Money problems had never been an issue for them. His brother had always been good with money and so had plenty hidden and stored away. This made it all the more surprising when Fulgrim lost his shop. Falagan had never known his brother to be bad with money.

The party continued its way into town, but something caught Falagan’s eye not thirty feet from the gates. While the rest of the party looked around for a moment to find a stable to store and buy horses, Falagan noticed a small crowd gathered around a three foot wooden fence. The crowd blocked his view, but Falagan could tell that there was hype emanating from the other side of the people. Even if he couldn’t, he would smell the money changing hands.

With a quick glance to his brother, he snuck backwards from the group and crept carefully over to the crowd. He pushed his way through the throng and found himself in front of a small arena. Small meaning about twelve feet squared. In the middle was a tiny human woman wearing practically nothing.

She was three foot tall and she was just about the most beautiful woman in the whole damn town. She was wearing a skimpy little two-piece outfit and carrying a sign with a big three emblazoned across it in huge font.

While others may have been confused by the spectacle, Falagan knew little-person fights when he saw them. He was a dwarf, so humans and elves tended to think of him as little anyway. He had fought in a few of these events in his younger days, but now he wasn’t fond of the bouts being seen as humorous. He needed people to see him as fierce when he wielded a weapon.

The little woman ended her pacing and ducked out of the ring through the ropes on the other side from Falagan. He briefly thought about how their children would look and thought about whether they would call him dad or father. Then he snapped back to reality when a three and a half foot human with scrapes and bruises stepped into the ring to face off with a four and a half foot orc.

Some people gasped and some cheered. Falagan had never seen a small orc before. Mostly, when orcs travelled around with smaller creatures, they chose goblins or kobolds. Tiny orcs had honestly never occurred to him before that moment.

His first thought was that the human didn’t stand a chance. His second thought was, “Oh shit! I haven’t bet anything on this match!” His eyes flicked around for a few moments before he finally saw a man holding a coin purse and taking money from people. He pushed his way through the crowd again toward the bookie. He reached for his money pouch and found it lighter than he liked. “I will bet twenty on the human to win the whole match.”

“Really?”

“He looks determined.”

“He looks like hell, but alright.” The man took his money and gave him a slip of parchment with a number on it. “Don’t lose this.”

Falagan turned around just in time to see the fight start. The orc charged the human and tried to gore him with his tiny tusks. The human dodged left and put the orc in a headlock. He pulled back hard and threw the orc over his head behind him. The orc did a full flip and landed on his feet. He charged again and this time the human tripped him low. He landed on his face and a gush of blood spurted from under his head.

A few seconds went by. No one spoke and no one moved. The human walked slowly over to the small orc. When he was within a foot of touching the guy, the bell rang and the round ended. A man ran into the ring and grabbed the human’s hand high in the air.

“Your winner, KR!”

People groaned and mumbled at their lost fortunes. Falagan walked over to the bookie.

“What were the odds on the little human?”

“Four hundred to one. You’re the only one who put any money on him at all.”

It was as though someone had started a symphony in Falagan’s head. His jaw dropped a bit as he stood there, nearly alone, in front of the bookie. He had just won eight thousand bucks. That was more than enough for a few horses on its own. He let out a small exhalation of breath and sat down on the edge of the ring to keep from falling over.

*****

He waited around with the bookie until all of the griping losers had yelled their piece at him and left. It took a while, but the sun was still high. Once the people had dissipated, he decided to ask about the orc’s well-being.

“I don’t know.”

“I know that this whole game was a scam.” Falagan was so matter-of-fact about it that the man just sighed and slumped a bit. “I figure no one in their right mind would willingly fight an angry orc in hand-to-hand combat.”

“I guess you know how much money you won then?”

“Eight thousand bucks. I expected you would try to claim it was eight hundred or something.”

The man let out another sigh. “Fine. Come over to the trailer.” The man hopped down and started towards the wagon. “Thanks for asking about Bill. No one usually cares when either of them gets hurt. I think he’s fine, but the blood wasn’t a part of the plan.”

“I figured that too. Any man that is unwell enough in the head to fight an orc doesn’t creep up on him with shock on his face when he’s obviously won the fight. Is he really an orc?”

“He is. His pack left him to die because he was a runt. That’s why we never see little ones. A priest found him and brought him to the monastery he ran. He raised him well but he left at fifteen. Joined us a few years later. It may not be the most honorable way to live, but he enjoys it.”

Falagan followed him to the wagon and got his money. “You guys may want to run more than three rounds. I figured that three rounds was the end, so I rushed to bet. If you run five rounds, more people will bet in the third and you can have Bill lose in the fourth or fifth.”

“I’ll pass that along. Thanks.”

Falagan shook the bookie’s hand and walked out into the street to look for the stable. When he found it, Fulgrim was irritated.

“How much did you bet?”

“Everything. But it was a sure thing.”

“It’s always a sure thing. Did you at least win this time?”

“Yeah. Eight grand. We can spend it on the horses and some decent gear for them. Quit worrying.”

“Quit spending all your money on stupid bets and I’ll stop worrying.”

The exchange had no malice in it. Falagan loved his brother and suspected his brother felt the same way. Fulgrim was actually irritated, but he wasn’t mad. He held all of the spending money because of Falagan’s proclivity for gambling.

“We bought the horses and some basic gear already, so give me whatever money you won that you aren’t willing to lose. I’ll add it to the current stock.”

Falagan counted out five thousand and handed it to his brother. He decided that he could spare the time that evening for a few games of poker in the inn. He also decided to go buy some more throwing daggers, maybe some silver ones and a few wooden throwing stakes.

*****

The afternoon passed by quickly. Falagan bought his supplies and went back to the inn. The evening started off well with his winning a few hands of cards, before it turned south and he lost everything he had on him. He was finally dragged away from the table by the appearance of the beautiful woman with the sign from the fight.

In the mage light, he could see her green eyes clearly. She wasn’t wearing the skimpy outfit anymore. She wore a baggy cloth blouse and baggy cloth pants. He saw her stepping up to the bar and hopping up onto a stool.

Falagan stood up and walked over to her just before he could bet money he didn’t have. “Hello, ma’am. I believe I saw you earlier.”

She smiled down at him from her spot on the stool. “Maybe, hon. I get seen by most people. It’s part of the job.”

That made him feel extremely dumb. Of course it was part of her job. So was walking around in nearly nothing and attracting people to the show. She was probably wearing such plain clothes to make sure nobody would bother her. He decided to leave before he made a fool of himself more than losing all his money already had.

She added after a moment, “Most don’t recognize my face after, though.”

“You do good work.” That was an even dumber thing to say. As though the gods had decided to tie his tongue when he was normally suave. He had never had a problem with talking to anyone. He was as much a catch as she was, but he just couldn’t speak. “Fuck. Bye.”

With that, he escaped quickly into the crowd. She may have been able to watch a human slink away from the bar, but he was a trained rogue and a dwarf. She couldn’t follow him if she tried.

Deciding that it was a bad idea to continue his waking hours, he walked up stairs and went into the party’s shared room. Rizra was sharpening a few weapons and Caelia was staring out the window.

Their room was on the fourth floor of the building. She seemed to be looking into the middle of nowhere. Fulgrim was still out, even though dark had fallen a few hours prior. Eaes’sid was in bed totally asleep. They had put a clean towel in his mouth to try preventing another outburst.

“What’s she staring at?” asked Falagan.

“She doesn’t like population centers,” responded Rizra.

“I can’t feel the forest here.” Caelia may have been a million miles away in her eyes, but her head was still obviously local. “My life has always been one of solitude. I protect nature and it protects me. Lately though, I have had to resort to coming into towns for supplies. My friend has grown ill, as I mentioned last night. Nature has started to become less able to take care of itself in the last few months.”

Falagan listened carefully. He thought about his last few missions over the months. Had there been any extra strangeness in the way the animals acted toward him? Maybe a few creatures saw him as a threat when they shouldn’t have. He had also been pretty convinced that some of the trees on his last mission grabbed his socks on purpose.

“My friend here,” Rizra pointed at his pocket, “has been a bit pricklier as of late. I think he might have a sense of what’s going on as well.”

Just then he stopped sharpening a dagger and pulled something reddish brown from a pouch on his belt. He held it over the pocket to which he had pointed and a beak popped up. It made a sniffing sound and then a head popped up. A tiny owlbear bit the food and ate it quickly. It then surveyed the room and made an odd chirping noise before retreating into its lair of solitude.

“More tiny creatures.”

“I know they’re usually much larger, but I find that small stature can be quite an advantage.”

“I agree,” said the dwarf, now standing in a heroic pose, arms akimbo, with a huge fake grin plastered on his face. Rizra and Caelia chuckled. Falagan dropped his arms in mock hurt at their mock insolence. Then he went back to his earlier point. “What I meant was that I had never seen such a small owlbear before, but I saw something else similar earlier. An orc.”

Caelia stopped looking out the window and stared back at him in confusion. “A tiny orc? Where did you see something like that?”

“These towns tend to be pretty boring. So, travelling shows make a decent living driving around from place to place. When we first got into town this afternoon, I saw a crowd and walked over. They had little people wrestling each other.”

“That’s kinda fucked up, isn’t it?” Eaes’sid was awake now. He was still lying down, but he was on his side looking at the others.

“Depends on who you are. I used to do it for fun and money, but I quit when one too many people belittled me for my stature. I beat him up and decided I was done being treated like trash. Some people don’t get treated that way, and some don’t really have any other choice. But my point wasn’t really about the wrestling itself. My point was that it was a human versus an orc.”

Rizra looked contemplative at that. Caelia stood up and looked down at the floor before placing her hands behind her back and pacing.

Eaes’sid was the first to speak. “How was the fight?”

“Rigged. They do that to make sure they get some kind of profit.”

“So the human won? That must have looked pretty neat. How did it end?”

“Not the way they expected. The human picked up the orc and tossed him backwards; that was according to plan. The orc landed on his feet and charged. He tripped and landed on his face though. Blood flew out from his face; that wasn’t supposed to happen. They ended the match a few seconds later.”

“Brutal. Bet it was still cool to see.”

“I think I understand. How old is Orcus, Rizra?” Caelia was obviously a little excited.

“I found him a few years ago, but not at birth. He’s probably about twenty or so. I never got him checked for that.”

“I think I understand what’s going on. Orcs and owlbears should not have such issues. They would certainly leave those to die or kill them themselves. But there is no way either could survive long without the specialized care required by both of those species at and around birth.”

“The bookie did tell me that the orc was left for dead as a baby. He said a priest raised him.”

“He would still have died without specific care. Orcs raise their children in rough conditions, but they still protect them carefully. They need nutrients from multiple members of the tribe to survive their first years. Owlbears need special attention from their parents, too. They exude a magic aura that the young feed from. They abandon the runts and only feed the strong cubs. I thought I had seen more runts in the last few years than I had before. It makes sense in human and elven cultures where they understand that it isn’t a weakness, but not in many others.”

“Even dwarves have a problem with it.” Falagan thought back to his childhood. “In our culture, being smaller than the other races is seen as a point of pride, but being smaller than the average dwarf is seen as a malady. My brother and I have a cousin who had twins. Both were much smaller than average. She kept them and became ostracized for it. Those two are doing fine, but they deal with prejudice every day.”

“Does this have something to do with nature being sick?” Eaes’sid was sitting up now. Falagan could tell he was more interested than earlier.

“I believe so. About twenty-five years ago, I began feeling uneasy while travelling through the desert far to the south. Something was making the plant and animal life stunted. It isn’t a problem for most creatures, but if plants begin to grow on smaller scales too much, they no longer sustain the populations surrounding them.”

“If the animals shrink too, doesn’t that fix the problem? They need less food.”

“People and animals who are born smaller than average have weaker immune systems in many cases. But these animals had even weaker immune systems than normal. If too many species of plants or animals start being raised with weak immunity to illness, it won’t take more than a few generations to wipe out all life on this continent.”

Everyone stood silent for a moment. Just then, Fulgrim burst into the room, drunk. He was making out with the beautiful woman from the bar.

Falagan sighed. “I think I’m gonna get at least as drunk as he is right now.” Then he grabbed some money from his brother’s stash and went to the bar to do just that.


	10. Riverblossom

**Riverblossom**

Travelling long distances would probably never take much of a toll on Riverblossom. She didn’t think like other elves. By most of the people she met, she was considered insane. So when her granddaughter decided to leave town and become a bandit, Riverblossom was just about the only person in the world that wouldn’t question the decision, except for maybe, “Why hadn’t we done this before?”

As the two walked into the town east of the fork to sell their ill-gotten goodies, Riverblossom noticed the wrestling ring to the side of the gate. She had always wanted to wrestle in a sanctioned match, but nobody that knew her would let her near a fight for some reason.

“I’m going to watch the fights,” she proclaimed loudly to her granddaughter.

“Ok, Granny. Have fun. I’ll go find someone to sell this loot to.” Mara walked off toward the town center. It wasn’t a big place, but it was big enough to have a few streets with shops and a few others with houses and apartments. Riverblossom watched her granddaughter walk off before turning her full attention to the people setting up the ring.

It was early morning when they arrived in town. They had decided that stopping to rest was a bad idea when they heard a fight on the road the night before. They travelled all the way through the evening and decided that they would rest the next night. This was one of the advantages of being crazy, really. Mara may have needed rest more often than her grandmother, but both were capable of going a few nights with little to no rest.

Riverblossom made her way to the people setting up. “Good morning, fellow people.” She had a way of making friends with odd people fast and a way of making normal people feel odd fast. “What kind of bout will you be having this day?”

The people looked genuinely amused. Her thoughts leapt to them being the odd people who don’t mind odd friends. A short human woman walked out of a wagon set up about twenty feet to the side of the ring. “We are having midget fights.”

“Ah… What’s that?” Riverblossom had never had a problem with travelling long distances, but had never been worldly despite this. She had never heard such a term before.

“It’s just a word for people of abnormally small stature to the rest of their own race.” This time it was a tall man in faded clothes. He looked to be a bookie or a hype man. “We don’t tend to use the word, but many of our fans do.”

“Got it. Are you fighting, young lady?”

The short woman burst out laughing. “And mess up my pretty face? No. I’m a ring girl. I walk around in almost no clothes and show what round we’re in. We have a few matches set up for today with a couple of fights each. Care to stay and bet?”

“I don’t care much for the betting, but I would love to join in. Mind if I do something?”

The man thought for a few seconds. “You look like you could fight, but the matches are already set for today. Vashti, do you mind if she takes a round in your job?”

The short woman jumped at the chance. “I would love it. Come with me and we’ll fit you for something sexy.” She grabbed Riverblossom by the hands and dragged her into the wagon she had just exited.

The wagon wasn’t large by any means, but Vashti and Riverblossom both fit easily. The whole left wall was covered by a rack of clothes of many colors and designs. Vashti went straight to the front end of the rack and pulled down a myriad of two piece outfits.

“I think you would look good in…” She paused and stared at Riverblossom. The elf struck a ridiculous pose and the other woman laughed. “That attitude screams something special.” She grabbed all of the two piece suits and threw them with abandon back up on the rack. Most of them fell to the floor as she moved quickly to the back of the rack and picked up a stack of shiny and matte material from a box on the floor. She dropped the materials onto a table and it became immediately obvious that they were long dresses.

“Oooooh.” Riverblossom hadn’t worn a dress in a very long time. It wasn’t that she didn’t like dresses--in fact she loved them, they just weren’t practical for her line of work. Or the previous lines of work she occupied, either.

Vashti pulled one off of the top and held it up in front of Riverblossom and squinted. She was obviously trying to picture what the dress would look like while the elf was wearing it. She held it in the air for a second and shook her head.

“Trash.” She tossed the dress to the floor without a second look. She quickly retrieved another and repeated the process.

After about fifteen minutes of picking up and throwing away clothes, Vashti seemed to have narrowed it down to four dresses. Riverblossom walked over to examine what her choices were. She knew that it wasn’t really her choice though. She was a doll to this woman, a puppet to be played with and dressed up.

Her choices were all stunning, but two in particular caught her eye. The first was covered in the shiniest tiny stones she had ever seen. They shone different colors depending on where she stood. The second was a smooth silky white dress with a black line of fabric that got broader as it descended until it reached the bottom third of the dress. The black then covered the bottom third of the dress. It was hideous, to say the least. Why Vashti had chosen it might have been beyond the minds of saner beings.

Riverblossom didn’t even take a minute. “This one. It’s magnificent.”

“I thought you might want that one.” She picked up the useless clothes and tossed them to the floor with the rest. “Put it on! Put it on!”

Riverblossom picked up the dress and spun it around to look at it from all sides. After staring at it for a minute, she shed her clothes and put on the dress. It fit her perfectly. It was as though it had been tailored for her. She walked over to the full sized mirror and stared at the gorgeous creature staring back at her.

“You look amazing.” Vashti was standing behind her with her hands covering her mouth. She looked like she was going to cry. She would have fit right in at a wedding gown fitting. She regained her composure quickly.

“When the matches are almost ready, they’ll call us out and we’ll strut around the ring for a few minutes to draw in the crowd.”

Riverblossom heard her, but she was lost in her own reflection, a reflection that seemed to be staring back with different eyes… and a different smirk.

*****

A few hours passed while Riverblossom and Vashti talked about life on the road. She had spent much of her life in the presence of travelers, but Riverblossom hadn’t met a travelling showgirl before. To hear Vashti explain it, it gave her a feeling of power.

They were talking about a town the troupe had visited a few weeks before when the bell at the back of the wagon rang.

“That’s show time. Let’s go.”

The two women stood and walked out the door to the trailer. There was a small crowd gathered, but not many people. It was about 10:30 AM when they walked out.

Vashti escorted Riverblossom to the ring. They skipped arm-in-arm from the wagon to the ropes. Throughout the morning, Riverblossom had gathered that Vashti didn’t have many girly interactions on the road. The troupe only had a few women in it and the others were always working and didn’t have time to spend with her. So skipping arm-in-arm was the logical thing to do.

They climbed into the ring via a short staircase at one corner. As soon as they stepped in, the crowd grew by a few people. People in the ring meant that the show was about to start. Vashti stretched her arms and legs a bit and the crowd grew by a few more. This was obviously the crowd she and Vashti were supposed to draw in.

Riverblossom got the idea, they were supposed to entertain people before the show so that more people would join the crowd and bet on the matches. With this in mind, she walked over to Vashti and grabbed her by the waist from behind.

With no warning to the other woman, Riverblossom tossed her into the air and caught her in a standing position by the feet. The look and sound of mild shock from Vashti made the crowd mimic her. They thought that the acrobatic act was planned and something might have gone wrong. Riverblossom was small, but she had tossed her fair share of drunks and idiots from her bar. Tossing a little human in the air and catching her was easy, balancing her when Vashti didn’t know what she was doing was the hard part.

Vashti looked scared for a second before she recovered her composure. She pulled one foot free and held it up at an angle. The she kicked her other up to meet the first and landed in Riverblossom’s arms.

“You didn’t say you were an acrobat.”

“I’m not. You just told me to gather a crowd, and throwing a person into the air and catching them is eye catching.”

The next few minutes passed with more daring stunts. From flips off the top of the sturdy wooden corner posts to walking around on their hands, the duo drew a truly massive crowd for how big the town was. At about eleven AM, the bell next to the ring sang out and the two women bowed before exiting by flipping over the ropes and landing gracefully outside of the ring.

The man from before, who was now obviously the hype man, climbed through the ropes on the other side. He had a look of wonder and excitement on his face. “Ladies and gentlemen, the lovely ladies are only the beginning of today’s entertainment!”

*****

After the matches ended, Bill was rushed into a trailer near the back of the train. Riverblossom walked slowly behind the people carrying him. He was placed on a table in the trailer and she saw his face for the first time since the fight ended. One of his tusks was jammed into his cheek. His cheek had swollen at some point and the tusk just caught it wrong when he landed.

A man in a white jacket was examining him carefully.

“Bill? Can you hear me?” The small orc grunted that he could.

“Can you talk?” Another grunt of pain. He might have been able to talk, but Riverblossom guessed his tusk was causing him to keep tight-lipped.

Vashti grabbed her by the shoulder. “There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s go back to my trailer and change, then we can grab something to drink.” Riverblossom looked back into the trailer. Something seemed wrong. The trailer was darker than it should have been at just past noon. She relented though and followed Vashti back to her trailer.

Vashti changed into a set of what looked like burlap pants and a burlap shirt. Riverblossom hadn’t even considered that she would own such a thing. As she changed back into her own travelling gear and folded the dress back up, Vashti stopped her.

“You can keep that old thing. It never fit me properly, and it looks a million times better on you anyway.” She grabbed a paper sack that looked like it was designed to fit that dress and folded the dress into it. She wrapped it with a bow and handed it back to Riverblossom. “Consider it payment for helping out today.”

“I never expected to get paid. It was just fun.”

“I figured you wouldn’t mind. Otherwise we would have turned down the offer. We can’t really afford to go around spending money on people.”

“Thanks. I think I should go find my granddaughter now and prepare for leaving tomorrow. It was lovely meeting you.” She grabbed Vashti by the shoulders and dragged her into a big hug. “Have a nice life.”

She stepped out of the trailer and walked over to the inn. She found Mara speaking to the clerk at the front.

“Did you have fun today, Granny?”

“I did. I did acrobatics for a travelling road show and even got to be a ring girl! They gave me a dress as payment.”

The clerk looked oddly at her, as though what she had said was strange. Mara just laughed and hugged her. “You have an amazing life, Granny.”

They spent the rest of the evening sitting in a room on the fourth floor. They didn’t need much space, so they had gotten a smaller room to share.

“I sold everything we grabbed except the rocks. They seem important somehow, so I kept them. The tableware though sold for a lot. We have a few hundred now.”

“That’s great. Where do you want to go next? We could head back to the last town and spy out another caravan. This place is too small for it.”

“I agree. I would feel a bit bad for taking things from the people here.”

Just then, they heard a loud bang from the next room over. “People don’t know how to be quiet in their amorousness.”

“I’ll go ask them to quiet down.” Mara stood up and walked out the door.

Riverblossom waited a few minutes before starting to be concerned. Telling someone to fuck more quietly was annoying, but not time consuming. True, Mara might have joined in, but it was unlike her granddaughter.

A few more minutes passed and she decided to see what was taking so long. She stood up and walked from the room. The door to her left was open and she heard some voices. She walked slowly to the doorway to see what was going on.

As she peeked around the corner, she saw Mara sitting down in a chair with a look of anger on her face. She was staring at a point on the wall to the right or the door. Three people stood in an oddly elongated triangle around her. One was holding a knife behind her head.

It was obvious what happened. The men and women in the room had been drunk and made too much noise. When Mara asked them to quiet down, they got supremely angry at being told how to live their lives and tied her to a chair to kill her for her insolence.

Riverblossom was not accustomed to letting people hurt her grandchild. She tossed a few daggers into the room and killed the two men and the woman she could see. After they fell, she heard the woman who had been talking shut-up and draw a weapon. Mara took that moment of distraction to stand up and turn the woman’s weapon back on her. Riverblossom had been wrong about the tying her down part. What kind of dumb YOLO kids didn’t tie down a victim they intended to kill?

“Granny, we need to take a closer look at these stones.”

At that moment, a beautiful elf of the forest stepped through the door. “My name is Caelia, and I too would like to talk about these stones.”


	11. Caelia

**Caelia**

A noise from a few rooms down made for the perfect excuse. It was becoming more and more obvious that this dwarf was about to stop making out and start making love. Caelia took the opportunity to stand and walk out. She found that she wasn’t the only one. Rizra followed her and Eaes’sid followed behind them both. He closed the door when they were all out.

The hallway was a few feet across and could hold three people abreast of each other, but Rizra was following Caelia and Eaes’sid took up the rear. When they turned the corner at the end of the hall, they saw two doors open. Just outside one was a wood elf. She drew a few blades and tossed them violently into the room. The trio placed their backs to the wall and readied small weapons. The elf went into the room and they heard another body drop.

Caelia was concerned. Not for the dead people though, she could sense that they had been doing something dubious. She could also sense that her path was connected to this wood elf and whoever she had just saved.

“Granny, we need to take a closer look at these stones.”

Caelia’s ears perked up. The mere mention of the stones had done something to her sense of destiny. She decided at once to step in to the room. “My name is Caelia, and I too would like to talk about these stones.”

*****

Caelia was never one to talk much about herself, but through the course of the conversation that followed, she found it rather difficult to avoid.

The wood elf and the dark elf had introduced themselves as Riverblossom and Mara respectively. Riverblossom introduced herself as Mara’s grandmother, which was impossible in so many different ways. Mara seemed to know this and was just going along with it. After the introductions, Caelia asked them to talk about these stones.

“I know it sounds pushy, but I would like you tell me as much about these stone as you possibly can. Where did you find them?”

“We stole them from a wagon train. They hadn’t been carrying anything of much value except shiny tableware.” Riverblossom had been the one to answer. Mara seemed less inclined to talk about them stealing things from protected wagons. The mention of tableware made Eaes’sid’s face grow an interesting look.

“May I see the stones?”

This time Mara answered. “You seem like the decent sort, but there are three of you and two of us. How do we know this isn’t a trick to try stealing them from us?”

Caelia had to admit that she had a point. It was pretty unbalanced. The two elf women were capable, but any warrior or thief worth their salt could understand that the two rogues behind her were at least evenly matched just by looking at them.

“Would you be willing to show them to me alone? I feel that the stones you speak of are important to the destiny of this entire continent. Maybe even the world as we know it.”

Mara seemed to think it over. Her face cycled through concern a few times while mixing in obvious thoughts of tricking Caelia into something. There was nothing to be gained from tricking her though. Caelia was, materialistically, poor. She had her clothing and her beautiful halla. Of course she didn’t own the halla, it just knew she needed its help.

Mara finally settled on a face of honesty and nodded. “I’ll show you the stones, but send them away for a bit.” She pointed to Caelia’s companions. They looked to Caelia. She nodded to them and they turned away.

“We’ll be helping Falagan at the bar.”

Caelia looked confused for a second. “He just said he was going to get drun…” It dawned on her. “Oh. Have a good time.”

As soon as the others were gone, Mara walked out of the room and went next door. She opened a satchel and dug around for a minute. She looked a bit confused and put the satchel aside. She pulled out another one and started digging through that one. She visibly relaxed a bit.

“Thought I lost ‘em for a second.” She stood and walked over to the table near the outside wall. She set the stones down and backed away a bit. Caelia walked over and sat down at the table’s single chair. She stared at the two hunks of rock for a minute. Then she lifted one in her left hand and the other in her right.

“Vashti?” Riverblossom said it so abruptly that the other two women jumped.

“What’s a vash tie?” asked Mara.

Riverblossom didn’t seem to even acknowledge the question. She just walked out the door of the room and right down the hallway. Caelia found this behavior odd, but not too distracting. She went right back to her examination.

She lifted the stones again and stared at them closely. Something was magical about them, and it was powerful magic. Caelia closed her eyes and concentrated on the feel of the chair beneath her. When she felt it was a part of her, she sought the floor through the chair legs. She then sought the walls and the roof over her. She spread out her perception until she was one with the world around her. Then, she opened her eyes.

The ability to see the strings that hold the world together is not a skill Caelia had needed to use often, but it seemed that it was becoming a common theme on her current journey to step outside her normal comfort zone. She had spent more time in cities than she liked in the past few months and the strings were thicker here than out in nature, so it gave her a bigger headache to use it in towns as opposed to out in the woods.

The strings attached to the stones though, well, they weren’t strings anymore. They were more like nautical chains. They spread in every direction and became impossible for her to track in any sensible way. Normally, the strings connected to any person or object had a nearly invisible pulse that could direct Caelia toward the intended destiny of the thing. These stones had a definite pulse on every single link going to every direction and spreading out into the world.

The vision she was using allowed her to see through the constructs of man and deity and follow the strings as far as they would go, but this time she had a few problems. The chains allowed her to see where on the road the stones had been pilfered. They showed her where the stones had been found after laying dormant for thousands, if not millions, of years. They allowed her to see everything about the past of the stones leading back to them being found in a mine and tossed to the floor as useless.

She couldn’t see when they were placed there though, and she couldn’t see why they were placed there. These stones weren’t natural. She should have been able to see erosion of the stones caused by centuries of weather or, since they had been buried for so long, she should have seen some growth. Nothing could be seen past the last few years when they lay motionless on the floor of a near abandoned mine. She tried once more to turn toward the future.

Destiny is not exact. In some universes, destiny is the most powerful force. It guides every person and object from creation to destruction. A person who reads destiny in a world such as that is both royalty and hated by everyone who doesn’t want a reminder that they lack free will.

In other universes, champions of fate killed Destiny, ending the hold of guided everyday life. Some find it a comfort to no longer be guided by an unseen force, while others would commit suicide rather than live in a world that was impossible to predict.

The universe occupied by Caelia at the moment was one of the middle ground. People had destinies and fate guided every action, but the strings were merely a suggestion. People had the potential, if they followed their guts every day, to live exactly as fate designed. If they never listened to their urges though, fate had no hold on them.

Destiny was seen as a force by some, but to people like Caelia, it was a being. Destiny, to Caelia, was a godlike creature playing a board game against the universe. When it tried to move a piece on the board, the pieces chose whether to respond or ignore the prompt. The stones Caelia examined weren’t being given that option. Destiny was grabbing these rocks in almost every one of its infinite hands and holding on for dear life.

She got the impression that the objects on the table in front of her were the only things in the entire world worth protecting. But who should she be protecting them from? Was Destiny keeping the universe safe with these stones? Should she help them get where they were going?

Or should she try to stop them at all costs? For all she could tell, Destiny was trying to destroy the entire universe. Maybe it was tired of people ignoring it and wanted to start over here.

Either way, the headache was coming on and there was no reason to continue watching the strings of fate. She closed her eyes once again and pulled her perceptions into herself.

Looking at the world like that sapped any energy she had felt before. She slumped over onto the table and breathed heavily for a few minutes. Mara seemed to have stepped out while she was examining the stones. It must have been before she began looking at the strings though. When Caelia chose to see the universe as Destiny saw it, time froze. Objects and beings couldn’t move as long as she was looking at the world from the outside.

She gathered herself and sat up. She stood and walked to the door. Mara was red faced with embarrassment. She marched up to the door and stopped when she noticed Caelia wasn’t at the table anymore.

“Oh. Did you find anything out?”

“Those stones are the single most important items in the entire known universe. You have been chosen as the protector of the one you grabbed from the carts, and your ‘Granny’ has been chosen as the protector of the other one. I shall be accompanying you from now on, or until the stones cease to be important.”

Mara’s jaw had dropped open when Caelia called her a protector. Her eyes just got wider as she spoke. When Caelia finished, Mara took a minute and gathered herself before proclaiming, “I hereby bequeath responsibility of my stone to you.”

“Shit. I guess you trapped me. I have to take the stone from you then.”

“Really?!”

“No. When has that kind of thing ever worked? Do you think you can just dump you problems onto any passerby?”

“I was hoping. It was worth a shot. Are you sure you won’t take ‘em? I have to take care of my poor old Granny and she isn’t as young as she used to be.”

“She’s younger than you. I could tell just by looking at you. I am also able to see age in ways that you can’t. Bottom line, you’re stuck with these stones. My companions will likely want to go with me, but they may have other plans. So, whether you like it or not, you have just gained several party members.”

Mara’s red face paled a bit. “Fine. Granny and I will need to talk about this. She isn’t accepting of new people the way I am.”

“I would have to agree, but she seems to be quicker to accept changes in companions.” Caelia was looking past Mara toward her open door. Riverblossom was laughing and walking with a half-naked human with dwarfism. The woman was laughing just as hard when Fulgrim stepped into the doorway, hitching up his pants with a look of satisfaction.

Mara groaned and followed her Granny down the stairs toward the bar.

*****

Caelia had a meeting with all of her companions when they returned to the room later that night. She told them that she had to go with these two women and that the others, while tied to her and the two elves by Destiny, could go wherever they chose.

Rizra immediately said he was staying with her. The others thought it over and decided to follow her as far as their paths stayed the same. If they weren’t heading toward the crazy wizard, they would leave. If fate truly connected them together, they would find her again later.

They all slept in the rooms they paid for and headed out early the next morning. After paying and mounting their animals, Caelia realized that they truly had a travelling party now. Resting and supplies would be much easier to come by than before. She smiled as she considered how much she preferred travelling with a group. Her life had been filled with long stretches of loneliness. For a hundred years or so, she had not travelled with a group of more than two at a time. She was happier than she had been in a while.

The party rode for hours, heading back in the direction of the fork. They talked about their careers and what they had done with their lives in the past. Mara and Riverblossom both had long conversations with the group about their lives since being in the arena and owning a huge tavern.

Time seemed to pass more quickly than it had with just Rizra. He was a great conversationalist, but two people can only talk about so much before they get too personal, and he seemed to hide as much of his personal life and past as she did. Adding five extra companions to the group meant that everyone would have an easier time sleeping and the trip would be shorter.

After a few more hours, they reached the crossroads.

“We’re heading north,” said Falagan. “We have to reach a special meeting place that way.”

“We’re going that way too,” Mara chimed in. “I’m not really sure why. I just have a feeling in my stomach that hurts when I look the other ways.”

Caelia smiled. “Wonderful. We are all still travelling together then. This route will take us to a town a few day’s ride from here.”

The party turned their mounts and Caelia’s halla turned to follow them. She never steered her friend where she wanted to go, it just knew. They had been together long enough that it preferred her company, so it went where she wanted to go without question.

The road was worn down more than normal, Caelia could sense it. The road was rough and trodden on in ways that normally indicate an army, but the roads were too narrow for that. It was only wide enough for ten men abreast, and an army would have been so long that they couldn’t have missed it entirely with only a few days off of this road.

The horses seemed to dislike the path and more than once tried to leave the road for the woods. Most horses choose the openness of the road over the cramped forest, but it was apparent that they didn’t want to be here.

She closed her eyes and opened her perception again. When she opened them, she saw the glowing golden strings connecting her company and the road. She also saw a few strings connecting them to random locations in the middle of the woods. She had seen it before; they were about to be ambushed.

They still had at least a mile or so based on the angle at which the strings entered the woods, but they couldn’t just halt either. Two of the strings connected seemed to travel backwards. She followed those a ways and found that there were two creatures following them at quite a distance. They weren’t close enough to hear the group, but they would know if the party stopped that they had been seen. They might send out a signal to the others and the ambush would just turn into a chase southward down the road.

They couldn’t turn back south. Mara had said her gut feeling led her north, so they had to move this way. Caelia had to come up with a plan quick.

She would need to start by telling everyone, quietly, that they were being followed and that an ambush was being set for them up ahead. The ambush had about thirty goblin-like creatures, not including the two following them.

She snapped out of her vision and sped up to catch Rizra, who was furthest back in the line.

“We have two behind us and thirty ahead waiting. They look like goblins.”

“I noticed the goblins a few miles back, but I only knew about the two. I think a few of us have seen them since they aren’t being very silent.”

Caelia hadn’t noticed them before using her special sight. It made her feel a little dumb for thinking she had seen them first.

“Tell everyone that your halla needs a rest and we’ll dismount just up here for a break.”

Caelia nodded. “My friend here needs to take a short break. We’ve been travelling for hours. I see a spot right there that would be perfect.”

The party looked at where she was pointing and pulled their mounts over to the road side. Once everyone had dismounted, she whispered that the two watchers weren’t close enough to hear them, but she wanted to be careful anyway.

“There are thirty more waiting to ambush us a little less than a mile up the road. The two behind are spotting for them.”

Mara stood and stretched. “I’ll take care of those two real quick.”

Before anyone could say anything, Mara closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. She breathed out slowly and everyone could see her breath. It was black like tar and just as thick. She breathed it toward the ground and it slowly sank in to the forest floor. She stood up slowly, shaking a bit. She cracked her neck back and forth and sat back down.

“Done. Just give it a minute and those two will be dead.”

Caelia waited a few minutes before stretching her sight back out. She saw two faint strings attached to Mara that hadn’t been there before. They were connected to two black blobs of magic crawling inside two very dead goblins. She pulled back to reality.

“That just leaves the thirty up ahead. They are spread throughout the forest around the road. Each has some sort of signal horn. We could certainly avoid them, but that would force us to abandon our mounts in the woods as they grow thicker. I’m not the only one who dislikes the idea of doing that. We could also fight them head on. I know we could kill many of them easily, but we might not win. Even if we won, we might lose someone. What does everyone think?”

Mara spoke first. “I can take out five more with my tar breath. After that, I’m drained of energy for a few hours. I would also have to be within a quarter-mile to use it.”

“I can send Orcus out to take out a few on the ground level. He’s got no problems with killing at least four on his own. That leaves 21. I think we can each take out three apiece, and three of us can take out a fourth.”

The group decided that they would have no problems in a fight against three goblins, so they prepared their weapons and walked into the woods in groups. Rizra went with Falagan, Eaes’sid went with Riverblossom, and Mara went with Fulgrim and Caelia. When she used her power Caelia knew she would have to help defend her while the others did most of the fighting.

Within a few minutes, they were close enough for Mara to use her power. She blew the tar into the ground and immediately lay down. Caelia took up a position in between her and the goblins. They couldn’t see the party approaching, but it wouldn’t do for them to find Mara’s body while Caelia was looking away.

The tar took out goblins who were spread out from each other. They were used as a signal for the party to attack. One fell near Caelia and Fulgrim and two near each of the other groups. Once the first body hit the floor, hell broke loose.


	12. Ahria

**Ahria**

Picking up a new friend was something Ahria had never done. She was quiet much of the time and quite discerning when it came to new people around her. So it was all the more shocking that in the course of two days, she had picked up as many new friends.

Ahria grew up in a sheltered life for her first few years. She was educated in the ways of being a proper lady of the court. Dark elves had some strange beliefs according to most people. The court was filled with a patriarch, a matriarch, their children, and the first cousins of each court member. The patriarch and matriarch weren’t necessarily married or even related, they were just the most trusted male and female in the lands owned by the kingdom.

The matriarch when Ahria was young was her mother. This meant that she was destined to be married. The society of the dark elves was progressive enough, though, that her brothers had the same fate. Being the child of the matriarchs and patriarchs of the court meant that your life was fated for nothing but political marriage.

Ahria was raised with that knowledge, and she relished her time alone with her teachers. She got to learn the finer points of blah, and blah, and even blah.

The content of her lessons meant nothing to her. She just loved getting to be nearly alone in a bustling palace. She hated dealing with any trivial court matters because it meant leaving her beautiful rooms just so that she could return to them later, exhausted by the bullshit.

After about thirty years of the bullshit slowly taking over for her lessons, she decided that it should be enough for her mother to have three sons make political marriages. So she jumped out of her window to land on her horse and ride off, just like an old fairy tale.

The horse moved, however, and the window was on the fourth floor.

She spent a few days under the care of the court healers. When she had recovered her mother came to speak to her.

“Were you trying to kill yourself?”

“No. I wanted to… never mind. You wouldn’t care anyway.”

“Baby, I care. What’s wrong?”

Ahria hesitated. “I want to leave. I want adventure and danger. The books I’ve read all talk about brave men and women going off into the wild woods to fight monsters and slay evil people. Why can’t I do that?”

Her mother smiled. “You can.”

Ahria’s face twisted into a cute, confused face that made her mother burst with laughter.

“Child, you haven’t listened to a single thing your law teacher said. As a living, thinking being, you have the right to do as you wish. All the political marriages are just the default course. You need to fill out some paperwork, but when you’re ready to begin, you will get training from the royal survivalists and you can be whatever you want.”

Ahria sat back in shock. She had spent her entire adult life studying to be a smart wife. She didn’t even listen to her teachers most of the time because she just wanted to be alone. To think that all she had to do was pay attention in class and she would have learned about another way out.

The next week was filled with recovery from broken bones in the fall. After that, she trained for months in how to survive in the wild. She learned to build a fire, she learned to cook impromptu meals, most importantly though, she learned to shoot a bow. She also learned that she was really good at all of it.

She spent her time sneaking into and out of the palace, trying to fake assassinate her brothers. The first time she succeeded, she strutted straight out of her brother’s room and told the guard she killed him. The guard’s face paled and he ran in to see the royal sitting up in his bed with an arrow sticking out of his forehead. Ahria’s brother was rubbing his head with a look of resigned annoyance on his face because the arrow was porous wood with a sticky tip instead of a razor tip. The guard took one step on shaking knees and half collapsed to the floor.

After that, Ahria decided it was best to not inform the guards of their failure until the next day. After a few months, Ahria began to credit herself with the improvement in security. They knew there wasn’t a real threat, so they just used her ‘assassinations’ to find blind spots and weak points.

She finished her full training after a year. Her leaving meant that her youngest brother had to marry the man she was supposed to. They moved the wedding up so that she could witness her final sibling being married off. After the wedding, the court had a small ceremony for her and they watched her depart.

She was given tough leather armor and a beautiful long bow. They decided that the armor should be basic so that she wouldn’t be a target for robbery, but the bow was one of the best they could craft. They started crafting it the day she began training and they finished it a few weeks before she ended it.

She spent the next few years wandering the roads and forests. She learned to talk to the animals and hear what they truly meant. She learned to read weather patterns and when it was smart to take shelter early. She never felt the need for companionship really. She had taken on a few occasionally, but they usually just left after a few days. No one seemed to have the qualities of a truly good person.

Until she met Daliah and Tyrant.

*****

The triad travelled north along a worn dirt road. Daliah had sensed something back in the woods that made her animal friends hesitate to re-enter them. Ahria had been sensing something similar for a while now. She decided to trust her instincts and travel north to search for a cause. Tyrant had pledged to follow them and help them in whatever endeavor they chose. He seemed to need a cause to follow, and helping defend a pair of travelers was good enough for him, Ahria thought.

When they reached a fork, they decided to head straight. There was a town to the east that would allow them to rest before the longer trek north, but they didn’t need any more food and neither of the women wanted to buy a horse. Daliah didn’t like riding animals because it felt like slavery most of the time, especially bought animals. Ahria had no qualms about riding animals, but preferred to walk as it kept her stealthy.

The party noticed right away that something seemed off about the road. It was more damaged than these dirt roads normally were. A set of fresh tracks ran the road ahead of them. Ahria decided that something was off.

“Something about this feels off,” confirmed Tyrant.

“I don’t hear any animals,” said Daliah. “I didn’t hear any further south because I told them to leave the woods, but these aren’t my woods. Someone ought to be here.”

Ahria had learned how to pay attention to everything in her training, but she had been paying so much attention to the situation at hand that she hadn’t even noticed the continued lack of bugs and bird calls. They had discussed that entering a new set of woods would mean hearing new families of creatures. These new creatures might be threats because they wouldn’t be Daliah’s friends. Ahria had to remind herself that Daliah’s lack of sentient relationships meant that, sometimes, she lapsed into explaining everything more than once.

“The road ahead looks strange.” Ahria leaned to the ground and scrutinized it. “I think it would be best if we travelled through the trees off the road. Tyrant, would you be willing to stay on the road while we travel through the woods? We would, of course, stay within earshot.”

Tyrant seemed to consider this. “I think your plan has merit. If there is something ahead, I am least likely to take much damage from an ambush due to my armor. I shall keep a steady pace and move forward. If you hear me give a sharp whistle, it means trouble.”

The trio agreed and Ahria watched Daliah creep into the woods on the west side of the road. She saw her disappear and realized that being so in touch with nature meant being a talented stealth artist in the woods as well.

She waved to Tyrant and stepped into the east woods. As she disappeared from the road, she realized that this might have sounded like a plan to ditch Tyrant. He might be thinking that the two of them were leaving him on the road to run away and meet up further down the path. Social morays were not her specialty. She was learning, but court had left its markings on her. Tutors just never taught her how to be social. She ignored almost all of her lessons though, so she was sure they had at least tried. She continued to wish she had paid more attention when she was younger.

She travelled for awhile in the dark shade of the thick forest. It was getting later and none of them had come across anything dangerous or too out of the ordinary. Just as she was starting to wonder whether her feelings had led her to over-caution, she heard a caw from a raven.

Ahria turned toward the road and saw a raven standing a few feet from her. It stared at her with alternating eyes for a few moments.

“Daliah? What’s wrong?”

The raven hopped a few feet back towards the road and pecked at a dark spot on the ground. Ahria didn’t bother asking why she had decided to enter her raven form. She walked over to her bird friend and crouched down.

The spot left on the ground turned out to be, or seemed to be, a body. It was too short to be an elf or human and too narrow in build to be any kind of dwarf. It was covered from head to toe in some kind of dark black substance. She put her fingers out to touch the stuff, but she felt a sharp pinch on her ass.

“CAW!” quoth the raven.

“What? I need to know what this stuff is in case we come across it again.”

“CAW!” repeated the bird.

“Oh, fine. I won’t touch it, with my hand.”

Ahria stood and looked around for a stick. When she found one of sufficient length to keep Daliah from nipping at her, she returned to the body and poked it. The substance was thick and sticky. She brought it closer to her face and heard a small gurgle from the raven

“I’m not gonna eat it. I just want to see if it smells caustic.” The raven didn’t look too convinced, but it let her continue. She smelled the sticky stick. It smelled like dirt before rain, but it changed every few seconds to some other smell. “This is ethereal. It must have been summoned by a dark magician.”

“Caw,” repeated the raven.

“You aren’t being very helpful. We should warn Tyrant.”

“I am here already. I examined the other one. It is certainly magical in some way. Daliah is correct in warning us away from the substance.”

The raven bristled and stood a bit taller.

“We should be cautious, but this was a goblin. The ears and the teeth are dead giveaways.”

“I agree. Let’s walk together though. If there are more bodies out here, they may be hidden and I would hate to trip over one when it gets dark.”

Tyrant led the way back to the road and mounted his horse. Daliah changed back into herself and put her clothes back on. Ahria stretched out a bit as she reached the road. Creeping can be tiresome and she needed to stand up straight after all the crouching she had done.

The group continued up the road a ways. After about half an hour of walking, they saw a group of horses standing on the side of the road. They were all tied to a makeshift hitching post and seemed to be accompanied by a deer, which lifted its head to stare at Ahria.

They were just about to reach the herd, when they heard an explosion from up the road.


	13. The Battle of the Northern Route

**The Battle of the Northern Route**

The army of goblins had been lying in wait for anyone to approach. They were a band of nomadic pests who roamed from road to road and forest to forest looking for small groups of travelers to rob and eat. They hadn’t counted on a group of any real size attacking them.

Seven against thirty was fine, but they lost nine in the first few seconds. They had five die when Mara’s tar took them and another three died before someone hit the miniature owlbear hard enough to stop it. The offending goblin was instantly killed by Rizra in a rage.

Twenty-one against seven would still be fine, but neither side counted on a small army rising out of the ground. Caelia hadn’t seen them in her vision of fate because they weren’t tied to Destiny until they arose. The army was at least a hundred strong from what the goblins could see.

A goblin troop was the first to notice as he was dragged to the ground and torn apart. The second to notice was a goblin sapper. Standing on a makeshift tower, the sapper threw several kegs of black powder to the ground and tossed a torch after them. The not-so-brilliant creature was killed in the blast that leveled a nice clearing within a few feet around the explosion.

The horde of undead was almost unaffected as only five were shredded by the blast enough to end them. A few more sustained major deformations that would have killed any living attacker. Limbs flew off of them like sticks from the trees.

When the attacking band of people finally saw what was going on, they turned in an instant retreat. They understood that it was better to back away and regroup than die in the cramped woods from zombie attacks.

Caelia and Fulgrim picked up Mara and moved back out to the road. The creeping dead had incredibly slow movement, but that’s what happens when you spend so long underground with no exercise. Without blood flow, they weren’t going anywhere fast.

After a quick headcount, the band had a powwow about what they were going to do. While everyone was talking over options, Caelia decided it was best to spend a bit of her energy to bring Mara back to partial strength.

As yet undiscovered by the rest of the group, Caelia was primarily a healer. Her skills ranged from bringing back energy to drawing health from the environment to revitalize the near dead.

In moments, Mara snapped back to reality with a gasp. She looked at Caelia with some shock, but she received a look that told her that this wasn’t the time.

Mara hadn’t been unconscious at least. She knew what was happening around them. She stood and brushed off her clothes before joining in the conversation about what to do.

Caelia closed her eyes again and looked into the world as before. She saw many more strings than before and it was a bit scary. She had known something big was going to happen, just not here and not this soon. The strings stretched out in front of her and behind her. She followed some of the ones behind to find another small band of three people; a human in armor, a wood elf in basic leather with a small arsenal of weapons, and an elf/bear woman who was mid transformation into the latter.

There were so many strings from every direction that she was left with no choice but to conclude that they were surrounded by a massive army of the undead. She looked around at many of them. There were at least a thousand spreading out over a mile diameter from her. They were all heading toward her as though they knew exactly where they were.

Zombies have keen senses of smell and taste. Hearing and sight aren’t as strong as when they were alive, but the olfactory sense in zombies and ghouls is strong enough to drive them toward small populations from about the same distance as dogs. These zombies seemed to have a direct understanding of where exactly the group of living people was standing. Caelia breathed deeply and tried to relax. Something drove these beings from the ground en masse.

When she snapped out of her trance, another loud explosion emanated from the woods north of the group. After a moment, a few more rang out. A few zombies wandered out of the woods on either side of them and Eaes’sid breathed a ball of fire at them.

He thought to himself how many of those he might have left. He had only used his breath like that a few times, and it hurt a lot. His throat would probably only sustain a few more before his fuel sacs were depleted.

“There are nearly a thousand undead rising from the ground,” said Caelia. “We need a plan. There are ten of us now; there are some people coming toward us from where we left the horses. We need a plan.”

As she spoke, the three came out from the tree line: an elf, a human, and a big bear. “We can help,” spoke Tyrant.

The party had grown, but the odds were still a hundred to one against them. More explosions rocked the woods, but they were getting further and further apart. The goblin sappers were dying and slowly using up all of their explosives. The party would have fewer zombies to fight, but the odds wouldn’t change enough to make a major difference.

More zombies slowly trickled through the trees. The plan became to wait and allow them to close in before striking their heads off with blades while the archers called shots further down the road. Daliah was covering the road to the north by herself. The strength of a bear with her not-so-animal understanding of tactics made her a powerhouse. What little offensive magic the group had was saved up. It was decided that using up magic and energy might be a fatal error. If the group used its energy taking out the first few waves, they might not last too long.

The trickle became a pour after about fifteen minutes. The horde was no longer dealing with anymore explosions from the goblins and had its full attention turned to the party. Enough zombies were coming at them now that each person was dealing with two at a time.

“I think we should consider a tactical retreat,” yelled Falagan while he sliced off a pair of heads.

“To where?” asked Fulgrim. A zombie knocked his ax from his hands for a moment. Fulgrim ripped the zombie’s arm from its socket and knocked the thing’s head clear from its shoulders. He retrieved his ax and duel-wielded it with the arm.

“I agree that we have to move,” yelled Rizra. “If nothing else, the noise of these monsters groaning and shuffling is going to become an extreme distraction in a matter of minutes.”

As he said this, a crash in the woods to the west caused everyone to look briefly into the growing darkness of the tree line. Something big was moving through the forest and the party all recognized at once that they needed to hoof it.

“Move, now! Get back to the horses!” Tyrant didn’t need to shout; everyone had come to the same conclusion simultaneously.

They cut a swath through the horde as the noise turned to follow them through the trees.

“They can sense us as though every one of them could see us clearly. How the hell are they doing it?” Ahria was confused. She had heard of zombies before and had even learned how they sometimes travel in hordes because someone summoned them for a specific purpose. She had not heard anyone tell stories of zombie hordes having ESP and chasing small groups of people outside line of sight. The whole party was confused on this point and, as a group, unanimously decided not to answer.

They moved with precision back south along the road until they reached their mounts. Daliah chose to remain in bear form as she could move more quickly like that. Ahria jumped on Tyrant’s horse right after he mounted it. The rest retrieved their own mounts and, after breaking the hitching post, they rode southward with haste.

Zombies move slowly, but whatever was following them through the woods was not a zombie. It kept a steady pace with them, which at this speed meant a lot more crashing sounds. The party rode until they could no longer see zombies on the road. It was getting darker and the road wasn’t as easy to gaze the length of anymore.

“We can’t ride back too far south,” said Eaes’sid. “If we keep going, we’ll draw the beasts into populated areas. We might cause the destruction of one of those towns.”

“What do you suggest?” asked Riverblossom. She had been quiet up to this point, but the problem intrigued her. “We could stop here and try to fight whatever seems to be following us in the forest. We could also turn around and run straight into the oncoming horde of the undead. We don’t have any other options that I can think of.” It was said without malice or irritation. Everyone could see that she was genuine in her questioning, and right about their situation.

“I guess we should fight,” Rizra said. He slowed his pace and everyone followed. They dismounted the horses and halla and turned to face whatever the oncoming threat was.

They looked to the tree line. The crashing had slowed to match them, but was still obviously coming. It was just past twilight and it grew more and more difficult to see through the trees. The fighters lined up and prepared for whatever was coming.

It took a minute for the thing to catch up to them. The noise of trees snapping grew louder as it approached. It was obviously felling them as it ran. When it did finally reach the road, the trees parted and snapped from the roots. It wasn’t an ordinary zombie. What walked out of the woods was a twenty foot tall cyclops with a few snapped sticks poking out of it that must have come from smashing through the forest and more than a few shafts that must have been what killed it the first time.

“Oh shit,” whispered half of the party together.

The creature stopped moving and stared at the line of people and a bear. It drew in a deep breath and let it out with a horrible roar that shook the landscape.

After a second of silence, Riverblossom roared back at it and sneered. It might have been impressive to a living cyclops, but the undead one didn’t seem to notice. It charged the party with as much speed as it could muster. It was a zombie, so it wasn’t fast. However, it was a large biped. Its gait was quite long and what slow meant to it was quick for a group of tiny people.

The beast loped through the middle of the group as they barely dodged it. It was too brainless to use a weapon at least. It turned and swung at the bear, who had taken the chance to charge its ankles. The cyclops missed when Daliah ducked out of the way, but she missed her charge as well. Ahria shot a few arrows at its head, but they all bounced off.

“Why isn’t this working?”

Eaes’sid answered, “Cyclopes have incredibly thick skulls. They need them with how many rockslides happen in their natural homes in the mountains.”

“If they live in the mountains…” Fulgrim dodged a direct attack from the giant. “…why is it out here in the middle of the woods?”

Caelia took a turn to answer. “Trolls, goblins, kobolds, cyclopes, and ton of other beasts and dumber creatures have been dragged into the wars of tyrants and madmen.”

“I have never pulled any such creature…” Tyrant stopped himself. He didn’t understand what she meant in the moment.

“Sorry. I will choose my words more carefully in the future.” A huge fist just missed her head.

“How do we fight a thing that can only die by destroying the brain if the brain is protected by a few inches of bone?”

Mara jumped into the woods off the road. “I have an idea.” She inhaled deeply and breathed out a long, slow breath. The ground in front of her became a deep black and the cyclops stopped moving.

The cyclops struggled against the bindings of the magic. It was so sticky that even a creature of its size was having problems moving. The party stood at a distance and watched with anticipation. It fell to the ground and stood back up several times in its struggle.

The tar crawled and stretched its way up one leg before the cyclops would snap it and it changed legs. The cycle looked like there wouldn’t be a clear victor.

“Shoot for the eye!” Rizra yelled as he whipped out his bow. Bows all out and ready fired repeatedly, as quickly as they could manage. Shot after shot hit the creature’s eye.

“Why isn’t this working?”

“Because you don’t know anatomy of magical creatures well enough.” A new voice broke in from behind them. “Stand back.”

Two high elves approached slowly on horseback. Isilude and Thranduil dismounted and walked over to the large beast’s face. They both breathed in deeply and then exhaled slowly as a slow stream of fire flew from their fingers into the eye of the monster. Within moments, it roared again and fell to the ground truly dead.

“There is a great deal of magic swirling around this thing,” said Isilude as he examined it closely. “Did one of you summon it?”

“Of course they didn’t,” barked Thranduil. “These people have no summoning power. Just look at them.”

Everyone took enough offense at the remark to be irritated, but no one took enough to be rude to their saviors. “A horde of a few hundred zombies is walking this way from the north. They’re following us for some reason.” Ahria wanted to explain further, but she said this much while moving with Riverblossom to check on Mara.

“They were summoned to target you. That’s standard for any mage trying to kill someone. The fact that there are so many indicates that the person in question is a master of summoning. The fact that they can sense you at this distance and hone in on exactly where you are indicates that he is a master of the highest level.” Thranduil liked explaining things to people he considered dumb, but he said it in a way that sounded like he didn’t think that way.

Isilude thought for a moment. “It’s obvious who it is. I don’t think he would attack random travelers though. Who are you people?”

“No time. The horde is on its way here.” Caelia interjected calmly. “We need to take the fight to them and set a trap here. They are being raised, but not controlled directly. If we set some traps, we can do a lot of damage.”

“Mara’s nearly out of power again.” Riverblossom was helping her granddaughter walk toward the group. Ahria was close behind.

“You said they were summoned to kill us. If they kill us, will they go back into the ground and stay there?” Falagan wasn’t really sure how the magic worked and nobody else was really sure either.

“The monsters that have been summoned will just pick new targets. They’ll start to attack settlements near here and, based on the size of the horde, no one will be able to get much warning before the towns are overrun and everyone dies.” Thranduil stopped and thought for a minute. “I think we will have to help you. You may even be able to help us understand something about the summoner.”

Caelia placed a hand on Mara’s shoulder. She stirred and stood up straight. “Thanks.”

“I know some summoning spells that can help us,” said Isilude. “But you’re going to need your arrows. Ranged weapons will be a basic requirement here, unless one of you can turn into a bear.”

To this moment, Daliah had been behind the cyclops. At this summons, she stepped out and growled at the wizard as she walked by. He jumped a bit and let out a squeak. She walked over to Ahria and sat down like a big puppy with her tongue out.

Isilude smoothed the wrinkles in his robes. “Unexpected, but not unwelcome. Anyone with that kind of strength should be near the front.”

Daliah gave a nod of understanding and agreement.

*****

After a few minutes of careful preparation, zombies began to appear north of the party. They looked like they had much greater numbers than before, but it was mostly an illusion caused by so many standing shoulder to shoulder. They gave the appearance of an army in multi-colored uniforms in varying degrees of disrepair.

It was totally dark now and it was nearly impossible to see for some of the party. Eaes’sid stood near the front and breathed fire onto the ground in an arch. He set the woods on fire near the road and used his breath to create a shield of flame around the party of twelve plus Orcus.

Orcus was still hurt from the goblin hit earlier and had decided to sit out this battle.

The approaching horde walked slowly into the flames and burned. In some cases, the zombies fell to the ground with destroyed heads as the fire ran up their bodies. Many other cases were the more terrifying result.

During zombie outbreaks, having moving, undead bodies covered in fire is never very appealing. Pillars of flame that can bite you to death sounds scarier than flaming zombie, so the mage schools tend to say the former to make sure students don’t do this. Firstly, Eaes’sid did not go to a mage school. Secondly, and this is more important, Thranduil thought it would be funny and Isilude didn’t know the plan.

Arrows flew from the party to find target after target. They didn’t shoot up the middle so as to avoid hitting Daliah and the summoning circle that Isilude had placed. Daliah broke person after person who dared step in range. The zombies coming from the sides walked through fire as well. When they reached the melee members of the party, they met swift ends. Thranduil was putting up defensive spells and shooting lightning at large clusters of foes. Regardless of position, the entire group was starting to get tired. Everyone had been travelling all day and some hadn’t rested in comfy beds the night before.

As a way of relieving some of the stress on the front, Isilude summoned chickens and sheep as distractions from his summoning circle. Those wouldn’t drain him too quickly and he decided that summoning anything much more dangerous inside a wall of fire had the potential to be just as dangerous for them as for the undead. He knew he was going to have to switch to something more aggressive soon though because Daliah was down to only killing a few every minute.

The horde was still massive, even after an hour of fighting them. The archers were long out of arrows and bolts and everyone was becoming so drained that swinging weapons was difficult. Daliah had lost so much energy that she was fighting back in her elf form. They all had backed up so they were in a semi-circle facing outward from each other with the dead cyclops to their backs. Blades crunched against necks and skulls and the circle of fire had nearly burned out. The only thing keeping them going was taking short breaks inside the circle while everyone else fought.

A wall of bodies had formed in front of them. The zombies were piled too high for them to see where the next hand would come from. Isilude decided that he could risk summoning something a bit dangerous, because the alternative seemed to be an eternal fight with the undead.

He closed his eyes and pushed out his perception to feel for his circle. When he found it he breathed the spell outward toward it. It landed and the entire world seemed to glow for a second. A deep growl could be heard from behind the zombie wall. He was sure that he had summoned something that didn’t make a noise like that. He wasn’t even sure he could summon something that made a noise like that.

A gout of flame burst over the heads of the party. A roar loud enough to wake the dead (but hopefully not literally, they had enough to deal with) rocked the earth under foot.

Snapping sounds followed by more flames and roars filled the next five minutes. The wall of zombies had stopped trying to grab them and seemed to be only dead bodies now.

A loud whooshing noise filled the air. Daliah recognized it instantly. “That’s a transformation. Did that thing outside just transform?”

“Yes, my dear. I did.” A deep female voice reached over the pile of bodies. “Now let me see who I have saved.” A soft white light glowed from the other side of the wall and the bodies disintegrated. They became dust, which filled the air and made everyone cough. It felt like they were in a sandstorm for a few minutes and it was impossible to see.

When the dust cleared the air, the party found themselves staring at an average looking human woman. She had short black hair and wore a long purple dress. She seemed to glow and shimmer. Her dress also seemed to think there was a breeze when there was most certainly no wind. Her hair agreed with the dress.

“Who are you?” Caelia asked with some trepidation. “You aren’t tied to Destiny.”

“Oh no. They and I have an agreement to stay out of each other’s way. I couldn’t leave this alone though. Someone is messing with fate in this world and trying to take control of it. That makes me a bit uncomfortable. But where are my manners? It is lovely to meet you. I am Bedlam, the god of chaos.”


End file.
